tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254Tue, 12 Sep 2017 07:27:57 +0000Free and Responsible SearchF&RS is the philosophical/religious blog of Doug Muder. Its title comes from "a free and responsible search for truth and meaning," the 4th principle of Unitarian Universalism. You can find Doug's weekly political summary at The Weekly Sift and his longer political articles at Open Source Journalism. He also writes on a number of group blogs under the pseudonym Pericles.http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)Blogger127125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-8748264792260970949Thu, 15 Jun 2017 14:19:00 +00002017-06-15T10:19:41.187-04:00The Born-Again Unitarian Universalist<p style="text-align: center;"><em>Versions of this talk were delivered at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on April 30, 2017 and at First Parish Church of Billerica, Massachusetts on March 26, 2017</em></p><h3>Opening Words</h3><p>"Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. For this reason, the argument which is always forthcoming to silence those who conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely, the appeal to experience, is forever invalid and vain. We give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson</p><h3>Meditation</h3><p>"Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late." -- William James</p><h3>Readings</h3><p style="text-align: center;">from <em>The Varieties of Religious Experience</em> by William James, <br /><em>Life on the Screen:</em> <em>Identity in the Age of the Internet</em> by Sherry Turkle, <br /><em>Reality is Broken</em> by Jane McGonigal, <br />and “Oh, When I Was in Love With You” by A. E. Housman</p><p>When Modern Library selected the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century, #2 on their list was William James’ <em>The Varieties of Religious Experience</em> from 1902. In that book, James was trying to break down the wall between psychology and religious studies. He wanted to claim religious experience as part of human experience, and expand the language of psychology to include it.</p><p>And so in this book he walks a narrow path, neither rejecting religious testimony outright nor accepting it at face value. He constructs what was then a new kind of objectivity, one that could listen to people’s accounts of experiencing God’s presence the same way that it listened to their accounts of falling in love or sliding into depression. People experience things, and describe them honestly but imperfectly. What, if anything, do we think actually happened?</p><p>The center of the book is James’ description of conversion experiences, when people report that God reaches into their lives and changes them top to bottom, so that they become, in essence, new people. He begins his explanation of this phenomenon by noting that we are all, in some unremarkable way, different people in different settings. Teddy Roosevelt, he imagines, is a different person on a hunting trip than in the White House.</p><p>Our primary identity, then, the person that we think we are most of the time, is not the whole of who we are, it’s just the center of a larger system. The ordinary experiences of life may change this larger system in ways that we do not always take account of, until our central identity doesn’t fit quite right any more, leading us to feel a vague wrongness about ourselves that we don’t really know what to do with.</p><p>Sometimes that sense of wrongness resolves itself suddenly, and we may feel as if some external force has changed us. In James’ account, though, the new identity forms not in the mind of God, but in the unconscious of the individual. Without us even realizing what is happening, who we are in some tiny sliver of our lives may be the model for who we become in a broader sense.</p><p>He writes: "Neither an outside observer nor the Subject who undergoes the process can explain fully how particular experiences are able to change one’s centre of energy so decisively, or why they so often have to bide their hour to do so. We have a thought, or we perform an act, repeatedly, but on a certain day the real meaning of the thought peals through us for the first time, or the act has suddenly turned into a moral impossibility. All we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re-crystallize around it."</p><p>An example of how a new identity might incubate in one sliver of your life and then spread comes from a much more recent book, <em>Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet</em> by Sherry Turkle:</p><p>"My mother died when I was nineteen and a college junior. Upset and disoriented, I dropped out of school, I traveled to Europe, ended up in Paris, studied history and political science, and worked at a series of odd jobs from housecleaner to English tutor.</p><p>"The French-speaking Sherry, I was pleased to discover, was somewhat different from the English-speaking one. French-speaking Sherry was not unrecognizable, but she was her own person. In particular, while the English-speaking Sherry had little confidence that she could take care of herself, the French-speaking Sherry simply had to and got on with it.</p><p>"On trips back home, English-speaking Sherry rediscovered old timidities. [So] I kept returning to France, thirsty for more French speaking. Little by little, I became increasingly fluent in French and comfortable with the persona of the resourceful, French-speaking young woman. Now I cycled through the French- and English-speaking Sherry until the movement seemed natural; I could bend toward one and then the other with increasing flexibility.</p><p>"When English-speaking Sherry finally returned to college in the United States, she was never as brave as French-speaking Sherry. But she could hold her own. ...</p><p>"When I got to know French Sherry. I no longer saw the less confident English-speaking Sherry as my one authentic self." </p><p>Even more recently, computer-game designer Jane McGonigal’s book <em>Reality is Broken</em> has added one further twist: The part of life where your new and better self first manifests doesn’t even have to be real.</p><p>Sometimes gamers feel that their characters a virtual universe are closer to their true selves than the characters they express in everyday life. It is not unusual to hear someone say that their game character is simply a better person — bolder, more honest, more courageous, and perhaps even brighter and more creative — than who they are outside the game. McGonigal herself claims she sometimes envies her character in World of Warcraft. “If I have one regret in life,” she says, “it’s that my undead priest is smarter than I am.”</p><p>But a discussion of such transformations wouldn’t be complete without acknowledging that sometimes they don’t stick, as A. E. Housman noted in the following poem.</p><p style="text-align: center;">Oh, when I was in love with you, <br /> Then I was clean and brave, <br />And miles around the wonder grew<br /> How well did I behave. </p><p style="text-align: center;">And now the fancy passes by,<br /> And nothing will remain, <br />And miles around they’ll say <br /> that I am quite myself again.</p><h3>Talk</h3><p>A few months ago my wife and I drove to Florida and back, so we passed through a sizable chunk of the South, where we saw a number of billboards about Jesus.</p><p>What fascinated me about these Christian messages was the way they seemed intended to bring people up short, to stop an everyday thought-process in its tracks. “When you die,” said one, “you will meet God.” Others asked drivers where we were headed: not which exit, but towards Heaven or Hell?</p><p>Now, I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that I did not find Jesus and get saved on this trip -- I knew you'd be worried about that -- so the billboards failed in their direct purpose. But I grudgingly came to admire the underlying attitude: that religion ought to bring you up short. From time to time it ought to break through the hypnotic song of everyday life, the one that constantly keeps us focused a few exits or hours or days down the road: Who’s picking up the kids? What’s my next deadline at work? Where’s that TV series going? What’s Trump up to this time? And so on.</p><p>Too often, Unitarian Universalism just adds its own verses to that song: Should I make an announcement about that? Who do I want to talk to at coffee hour? Am I ready for my next committee meeting? A speaker may give you another issue to keep track of or another book to read. But your church experience usually doesn’t jolt you out of that focus on the near future.</p><p>It could, in either direction. Like a meditation practice, it might remind you of the irreplaceable richness of this moment, the glimmering, twinkling aspect of perception that you can only notice by being fully present here and now.</p><p>Or, like those billboards, it could call your attention to the larger story of your life. One of the many wise things Yogi Berra is supposed to have said is, “If you don’t change direction, you’ll probably wind up where you’re going.” So, where are you going? You don’t have to believe in a literal Heaven or Hell to realize that someday your life story will be complete. Are you satisfied with how it’s turning out?</p><p>It isn’t that UUs don’t ask questions like this. All people do from time to time. But we tend to have these thoughts someplace other than church. They show up, for example, on round-numbered birthdays. I turned 60 last fall: Is this where I thought I’d be? How do I feel about that? They also occur when somebody we measure ourselves against reaches a milestone: graduates or gets a promotion or retires or marries or has a child or grandchild. That’s where they are in their lives; where am I in mine?</p><p>And because these thoughts occur to each of us on our own idiosyncratic schedules, we tend to have them alone, when we’re waiting in line or awake in the middle of the night. If we’re lucky, some friend might listen to our concerns, but even then, the thoughts remain our own.</p><p>What we usually don’t do is get together as a community and admit that we all sometimes wonder where our lives are going, if we’re where we’re supposed to be, or if we need some kind of drastic change. Those questions are simultaneously intensely personal and very generically human.</p><p>One reason I think Christianity can get away with raising these kinds of questions, and even actively promoting people’s dissatisfaction with the course of their lives, is that Christians have a narrative of transformation. At the root of their worldview is a belief in sudden, sweeping change.</p><p>In an instant, the power of God could remake you completely. The Lord appears to Moses in a burning bush and calls him to save his people. On the road to Damascus, the voice of the risen Jesus speaks to Saul, the persecutor of Christians, and he becomes Paul, the greatest of the apostles. “Amazing Grace” claims that any sinner can go from lost to found, from blindness to sight — not through a long process of education and rehabilitation, but “the hour I first believed”. Grace comes into your life and blows away all the old obstacles.</p><p>In traditional Christianity, instant transformation goes all the way back to the Genesis Creation story, where there’s darkness, and then there’s light. The Sun and Moon, plants, animals, people — God says “Let there be” and there is, and it’s good. Just like that. By contrast, we tell the story of evolution, where progress is incredibly hard and takes forever. Generations live and die to mutate one little gene, so that over thousands or millions of years those tiny changes might add up to something.</p><p>Similarly, our church services are full of suggestions for change, but usually they are a thousand little changes: You should write your political representatives more often, and drive less, and recycle, and eat less meat, and stop using the language of the patriarchy, and boycott unjust corporations, and volunteer in soup kitchens, and register people to vote, and on and on and on. And nowhere in that story of being a good UU does otherworldly power infuse new energy into your life.</p><p>As a result, I sometimes come away depressed from talks that are supposed to inspire me. Rather than feeling fired up to go promote change, I sometimes think: “I have trouble getting taxes done and keeping the laundry from piling up. How am I going to do all that?”</p><p>Now imagine that someone starts talking about changing your whole life, and becoming a better person across the board. How? Without a belief in some kind of transforming power, bringing people up short and making them question where their lives are going is like a bad version of the old Listerine commercial: You persuade them that they have bad breath, but then you don’t have any mouthwash to sell them. Raising dissatisfaction without offering the hope of change on a similar scale is just cruel.</p><p>So I started to wonder if there might be some way to translate the Christian transformation narrative into Unitarian Universalist language. In other words: What would a born-again UU be like?How might a Unitarian life transform top to bottom?</p><p>Like William James, I went back and read a bunch of transformation stories out of the Christian tradition. And one of the first things I noticed is that the changes usually don’t happen as instantaneously as we sometimes think.</p><p>Moses isn’t listening to the burning bush one day and challenging Pharaoh the next. First he argues with God, then he meets with Aaron, then travels to get his father-in-law’s approval, then makes the 300-mile trek to meet with Jewish leaders in Egypt, and only then goes to Pharaoh. The Bible doesn’t tell us how long that took.</p><p>Saint Paul, similarly, has his experience on the road to Damascus, then continues into the city and waits three days before he’s healed of his vision-induced blindness. Then he spends time studying with the Christian community in Damascus, then goes to Jerusalem for another unspecified period, then sets off on the missionary voyages that eventually make him famous, and only then acquires his new name. The man whose authoritative voice we hear in the New Testament was many years removed from his supposedly instantaneous transformation.</p><p>But the story that really brings this point home is that of John Newton, who wrote “Amazing Grace”. His life did indeed transform. From a wild and rebellious sailor on slave ships, he eventually became a tea-totaling abolitionist Anglican priest.</p><p>Eventually.</p><p>Newton dated his conversion from 1748, after his ship survived a storm that he had been sure would kill him. But he continued captaining slave ships until 1754, when he had a stroke. Then he began studying for the priesthood and was ordained in 1764. “Amazing Grace” was published in 1779, and he wrote his first abolitionist tract in 1788, four decades after his conversion. So his transformation did not happen “the hour I first believed”, but played over the course of a lifetime.</p><p>Now, at this point it would be easy to stop and conclude that I’ve debunked the whole born-again idea, so we can ignore it and go on. But that’s not where I’m headed. Instead, I’d like to hone in on what exactly does happen in that first hour. Why do people like John Newton decades later still celebrate their “moment” of conversion, when they themselves must know just how many insights and how much hard work still had to happen? And the answer seems to be that while your whole life doesn't completely change in an instant, what you can do in an instant is turn around.</p><p>Moses did not become <em>Moses</em> the moment that he saw the burning bush. But after that experience, his life could never be the same. Suddenly he was on a new path, and eventually that path went somewhere.</p><p>This description fits with the testimonials you can hear today from people in 12-step programs. The traditional bottoming-out story, when the addict realizes that life can’t go on this way, resembles the Christian born-again testimonial in many respects. But the addict does not instantly transform. Quite the opposite, often the idea that change will be quick and easy is exactly what he needs to let go of. Part of turning around is realizing what a long, hard road now lies ahead.</p><p>It turns out that a major influence on the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous was William James’ account of conversion experiences. In particular, the vagueness of the “higher power” in 12-step programs comes from James’ observation that conversion experiences are universal, and depend barely at all on particular doctrines. The story of a spiritual crisis that resolves in a moment of renewal can be told in any religion.</p><p>In fact, if you listen to an atheist’s story of the moment when he escaped religion, you may well hear an affect that would otherwise be described as religious fervor. Whatever the content of the new belief system might be, suddenly there is a new way to look at life. Old barriers fall, old burdens can be cast aside, and new possibilities open up.</p><p>Unitarian Universalists also tell stories of crisis and renewal, but we don’t do it in any organized way. Former UUA President (and current interim co-president) William Sinkford has talked about finding unsuspected inner strength and spiritual depth while sitting by his son’s hospital bed, wondering if he would live.</p><p>In her book <em>Blessing the World</em>, UU theologian Rebecca Parker told of a crisis that led her to walk toward the waterfront late at night, planning to drown herself. What she found when she got there, though, was not the deserted lakeside park she had pictured, but a meeting of the local astronomy club with their telescopes, all eager to show her what they found beautiful and wonderful. “In a world where people get up in the middle of the night to looks at stars,” she writes, “I could not end my life.“ A central premise of all the essays in her book, it says in the introduction, is “that moments of despair can be opportunities for spiritual and theological breakthrough.”</p><p>In fact, modern Universalism begins in the 1700s with a series of born-again experiences that — from an Evangelical point of view — went astray. Trailblazers like George de Benneville and Hosea Ballou went through the spiritual crises that the fire-and-brimstone sermons of that era were supposed to ignite, but instead of leading to a sense of God’s personal love for them, and assurance of their own personal salvation, their crises resolved with an experience of God’s universal love, assuring the salvation of everyone.</p><p>Clearly, the Holy Spirit misfired.</p><p>But that bit of our history brings us back to the central question: For those of us who no longer share a belief in a God who takes direct action in the world, where can the energy to renew our lives come from? Is it also part of a naturalistic explanation, or are we left to either return to Christianity or gin up our own transforming power?</p><p>Here’s my hypothesis about one possible source of transformational energy: Dissatisfaction has a way of sneaking up on a person. You aren’t usually thrilled with your life one day and then in despair about it the next. So as the course of life slowly diverges from your hopes, one natural reaction is denial: Dissatisfaction, you tell yourself, is just a mood. Everything is fine. Life is under control, or soon will be. Any deviations from the ideal are temporary, incidental, and not my fault.</p><p>But as dissatisfaction grows, the denial of it has to grow as well. What begins as minor dissembling and a few omissions can turn into a 24/7 pretense of a happy life. And since part of pretending is pretending that you are not pretending, you can be completely unaware of just how much effort goes into maintaining that illusion. And when the things that are supposed to make you happy actually don’t, the natural reaction is to try harder. Maybe if I just did them right, did them perfectly, then everything would be OK. If I were just smarter, richer, more attractivemore vibrant, more lovable … then it would all work.</p><p>So when the crisis comes and pretense collapses, there is a hidden benefit: All the energy you have been putting into denial comes free again. Everything can just be what it is now, and doesn’t need to be explained away. Your castles in the air have fallen, but you also no longer need to hold them up.</p><p>In the period of despair that comes between the collapse and the beginning of renewal, it can be hard to notice that freed-up energy or appreciate the extent of it. I doubt Paul was feeling terribly energetic during those three days when he was sitting blind in Damascus. But once the process of renewal began, the energy to make a new life was available.</p><p>One final aspect of the born-again experience that I have yet to translate this morning is the one suggested by the word <em>grace</em>: the sense of being loved and nurtured and forgiven by some external power. When we are in denial, we often project the need for that denial onto the people around us. To the extent that we realize we are pretending, we tell ourselves that we do it for them. If the important people in our lives only knew what we are really like, if they suspected how unhappy, how angry, how depressed, how afraid, or how guilty we feel deep inside; if they knew what complete and total failures we really are, how little we resemble the people we pretend to be, they would drop us like a hot rock.</p><p>Or so we think.</p><p>But sometimes the exact opposite is what turns out to be true. The people who love us may be both better and smarter than we give them credit for. They may already see through us. They may already be rooting for us to confront our demons, to embrace our potential, and to become the person that is inside us waiting to come out. To the extent they cooperate in our denial, they may do so because we need it, not because they do.</p><p>The New Testament God, the loving all-knowing being who is patiently waiting to forgive us and welcome us back home if we would only ask, is both a symbol and a projection of that possibility. Accepting the perfect love of this divine archetype can be a step toward accepting the imperfect, human love of others, and ultimately, the deeply flawed love that we might someday have for ourselves. As Lewis the Dauphin says about his intended bridein Shakespeare’s King John, “I do protest I never loved myself till now infixed I beheld myself drawn in the flattering table of her eye.”</p><p>So, pulling this all together, I think Unitarian Universalism ought to be about more than a long list of small improvements we should make in our lives, or of projects that good people ought to contribute their energy and resources to. Now and then it ought to bring us up short, and ask us what — on the largest possible scale — we are doing with our lives. If we don’t change direction, we’re likely to wind up where we’re headed. Where is that? How do we feel about it?</p><p>And thinking outside of the box of our current identity, who could we be? Who have we thought about being, imagined being, wished we could become? Is there some tiny part of our lives in which we already are that better person? What’s stopping us from breaking down the barriers that keep our better selves from changing everything?</p><p>Changing everything is a big job. It doesn’t happen overnight. But if you start, if you turn around, you may be surprised how much energy suddenly comes free for the work of transformation, and how many people will support you in it. Those who love you, and who will love you, may have seen this truer, more authentic version long before you did, and have been waiting to meet you for a long, long time.</p><h3>Closing Words</h3><p>The closing words are by Sara Moore Campbell: "We receive fragments of holiness, glimpses of eternity, brief moments of insight. Let us gather them up for the precious gifts that they are, and, renewed by their grace, move boldly into the unknown."</p>http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-born-again-unitarian-universalist.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-6396980142113835355Mon, 27 Feb 2017 14:27:00 +00002017-02-27T09:27:04.694-05:00Why Be a Congregation?<p><em>Presented at the Unitarian Universalists of Lakewood Ranch, Florida on February 26, 2017.</em></p> <p><b>First Reading: “Principles and Purposes for All of Us”</b></p> <p>The next thing in the Order of Service is Responsive Reading #594, “Principles and Purposes for All of Us”. But before we read that, I like to say a few words about it.</p> <p>I grew up in a Lutheran church where we recited the Apostles’ Creed every Sunday. So when I became a UU, at first I tried to interpret the Principles as some kind of Unitarian Universalist creed.</p> <p>But that didn’t work very well. You see, when my old Lutheran congregation had said its creed, we were proclaiming that certain things were facts: The world was created by an almighty God, Jesus rose from the dead, Judgment Day was coming, and so on.</p> <p>But the UU Principles aren’t facts. “justice, equity, and compassion in human relations” is not a fact. I wish “respect for the interdependent web” were a fact, but in the world I see around me, it isn’t.</p> <p>So my second thought was that the Principles are opinions about how the world should be. But if what unites is is that we stand apart from the world and having opinions about it, that seems like a weak foundation to build a community around.</p> <p>Eventually, I came to view the Principles as vision statements: They describe not the world that is, but the world that we are working together to bring into existence. So as we do this reading, I invite you to try on that interpretation: We’re not stating facts, we’re not just having opinions; we’re sharing a vision of the world we want to make.</p> <p>We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.</p> <p><em>We believe that each and every person is important.</em></p> <p>We affirm and promote justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.</p> <p><em>We believe that all people should be treated fairly.</em></p> <p>We affirm and promote acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth.</p> <p><em>We believe that our churches are places where all people are accepted, and where we keep on learning together.</em></p> <p>We affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.</p> <p><em>We believe that each person must be free to search for what is true and right in life.</em></p> <p>We affirm and promote the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process.</p> <p><em>We believe that all people should have a voice and a vote about the things which concern them.</em></p> <p>We affirm and promote the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all.</p> <p><em>We believe that we should work for a peaceful, fair, and free world.</em></p> <p>We affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. </p> <p><em>We believe that we should care for our planet earth.</em></p> <p><strong>Second Reading: “The Tilted Metronome”</strong></p><p>The next reading is from the essay “The Tilted Metronome” by Ian Carroll, who I know because we’re part of the same congregation in Bedford, Massachusetts.</p> <p>One of the advantages of belonging to a congregation is that because you’re seeing the same people over and over again, ideas bounce back and forth. If you put something out there, somebody might improve it and give it back to you.</p> <p>A few years ago I gave a talk where I compared a healthy spiritual life to a pendulum that swings back and forth between action and contemplation. One is not better than the other; they’re parts of a whole. We do inner work; we do outer work.</p> <p>A few weeks ago, Ian took that metaphor and changed it a little. Being a musician, he turned my pendulum into a metronome. And he observed that if you put a metronome on a tilted surface, one side of the cycle is longer than the other: <em>tiiiick-tock</em>, <em>tiiick-tock</em>. </p> <p>He used that to represent the idea that we all have natural inclinations that make us more comfortable on one side of the spectrum than the other, and yet we still need both to be complete.</p> <p>Ian has always experienced himself primarily as a contemplative person, but as he looks at the current situation in the world, he is feeling the need to enter an active phase. And he closes with this lovely vision of how the members of a congregation balance each other. </p> <p>“The week after the election, yes the one that ushered Donald Trump into the presidency, Rev. John spoke of the urgency of this moment in history, and of the need to immerse ourselves more deeply in beauty, art, nature, and creativity. But he also spoke of the need to be outraged, to protest, to fight for justice with greater intensity than ever before. </p> <p>“Not surprisingly, I initially gravitated towards his encouragement to find more quiet and solace in our lives. That’s what I need, I thought. </p> <p>“The more I’ve considered his words, though, the more I’ve realized I need to respond to his exhortation to act. I’m certain that others in the pews that day had the opposite reaction to me, and felt their hearts leap at the call to action. But like me, they too will feel, in time, their pendulums swinging the other way. </p> <p>“If you’re one of those people, and you feel the need to take a step back, to regroup for a little while, there might be a vacant seat up in the rear of the balcony. Because I’ll be in a pew near the front. …</p> <p>“I will always be a listener first and foremost. That’s how I feel most comfortable. Tiiiick, tock, tiiiick, tock, is the sound my metronome—my tilted metronome—makes. If you are a doer, yours may make quite a different sound. </p> <p>“In this healthy, spirited community, we honor both. But the collective, beautiful weight of this congregation also challenges us, subtly shifting the ground on which we stand, altering the tilt of our metronomes. And so too does the ominous gravity of the present era.</p> <p>“Now is a time for us all to seek comfort, but more importantly, to embrace discomfort as well. That’s precisely why I’ll be sitting near the front of our Sanctuary, and it’s also why you might drift to the back, for a time. </p> <p>“There is a chorus of pendulums in motion around us, and one inside each of us, all swinging between their poles. Listen—can you hear them? From contemplation to action. From outer work to inner work. You protest, and I listen. I rise up, and you observe. </p> <p>“Together we will make ourselves, and our world, better. As individuals and as a community, in this historic moment, we need to find quiet. And we will make noise.”</p> <p><strong>Sermon: Why are we here this morning?</strong></p> <p>It’s exciting to be here at such a young fellowship, because when something is this new, you never know where it’s going to go. Maybe this group will maintain its small, intimate character, where everybody has a chance to know everybody else. Or maybe it will grow by leaps and bounds, and someday become a congregation of hundreds or even thousands.</p> <p>Maybe you’ll stick with the fellowship model, maybe you’ll evolve towards the traditional church model with a building and a staff, or maybe you’ll come up with something completely unique, so that years from now groups all over the country will say, “We’re following the Lakewood Ranch model.”</p> <p>Nobody knows what the future might hold, and that’s always keeps things interesting. </p> <p>One thing I can guess about the present, though, is that if you have friends who aren’t UUs, and if you happen to mention to them that you’re involved in starting a new Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, they probably look at you with a certain amount of confusion. Why would you do that?</p> <p>Other religions give their followers very good reasons for joining a congregation, or even for starting new ones. But most of those reasons don’t apply to us.</p> <p>In the church where I grew up, for example, we showed up on Sundays because one of the commandments says, “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy.” Of course, we never considered observing the original Jewish Sabbath, but we had reinterpreted that commandment to mean that God was ordering us to go to church on Sunday.</p> <p>My Catholic neighbors had even better reasons to go to church, because their place in Heaven was not determined by their personal relationship with God, it depended on rituals that could only be performed under the auspices of the Catholic Church.</p> <p>A lot of sects teach that it is vitally important to believe the correct dogmas, and how are you going to know what those are unless you come and listen while some authority stands in a pulpit and tells you? Some teach that there is a cosmic battle going on between Good and Evil, and joining a church is how you pick a side. </p> <p>All good reasons, but none that apply to us.</p> <p>Universalists will tell you that everyone is already going to Heaven, no matter what they believe or where they spend their Sunday mornings. And UUs who don’t think of themselves as Universalists usually don’t have much to say about the afterlife. If we believe in it at all, we know so little about it that we can’t even guess how you might improve your prospects. So if it turns out there is a Judgment Day, and we get asked how faithfully we attended a UU church, I will be as surprised as anybody.</p> <p>As for dogma, the person in the pulpit — today it’s me, next week it might be you. There’s no particular authority here. If a sermon makes sense or helps you figure out how you want to live, that’s great. But if it doesn’t, you should follow your own conscience rather than do what you’re told. Institutionally, the Unitarian Universalist Association doesn’t spell out how you should live or who you can love or what you have to eat or wear. </p> <p>So what does a UU church do for you?</p> <p>For a long time, a chief selling point of Unitarian Universalism was in all the things that it <em>doesn’t</em> do. It doesn’t ask you to check your brain at the door. It doesn’t make you feel guilty for asking questions or having doubts. It doesn’t dogmatize some pre-scientific cosmology or social prejudices that come down to us from the Bronze Age. It doesn’t set a clergy in authority over you. It doesn’t insist that you recite a creed you don’t really believe. </p> <p>That less-is-more idea is summed up in a probably apocryphal story about Fanny Holmes, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Supposedly, Fanny was talking to one of Oliver’s clerks, who knew that the old man wasn’t particularly religious, and so expressed some surprise when he discovered that they were Unitarians.</p> <p>“Well,” Fanny explained, “we’re from Boston. In Boston you have to be something. And Unitarian is as near nothing as you can get.”</p> <p>That argument made a certain amount of sense a hundred years ago, but it really doesn’t any more. Because today, you don’t have to be something. If you’re looking for a religion that’s near nothing, you can pick nothing. </p> <p>A lot of people do, and more all the time. The Pew Research Center says that in 2014, 23% of Americans considered themselves religiously unaffiliated. That was up sharply from 16% in 2007. </p> <p>Even the people who identify with a religion don’t necessarily belong to any congregation. In rough numbers, about a thousand American congregations affiliate with the UUA, accounting for about 200,000 people. But pollsters who ask people about their religions estimate that about 600,000 Americans call themselves Unitarian Universalists. </p> <p>Now that makes for some head-scratching at the UUA. Think about it: We could triple the size of every UU congregation in the country without converting anybody. All we’d have to do is sign up all the people who already would tell a pollster that they’re UUs. </p> <p>Nobody’s sure exactly who these other 400,000 are. Some are probably young adults who grew up UU, and never revolted against it, but didn’t bother to find a church of their own after they left home. Others might be older people who had a congregation up north, but never joined a new one after they retired and moved south.</p> <p>Some are probably people who have heard of Unitarian Universalism and agree with it philosophically, but they’re just not joiners. Like Kurt Vonnegut, for example. When he gave the Ware Lecture at General Assembly in 1984, he said, “In order not to seem a spiritual quadriplegic to strangers trying to get a fix on me, I sometimes say I’m a Unitarian Universalist.” But as far as I can tell, he never signed anybody’s membership book. </p> <p>I once made a project out of verifying one of those lists of “Famous UUs” you sometimes see on the internet. Dr. Seuss was a tough case to decide. He certainly would have fit in. I found a lot of resonances, a lot of very UU-sounding statements, but no specific congregation that claimed him. Maybe he just wasn’t a joiner. </p> <p>A lot people aren’t. And why should they be? Like Fanny Holmes’ “You have to be something”, many arguments for joining don’t make sense any more. </p> <p>If you’re looking intellectual stimulation, you could spend your Sunday morning reading <em>The New York Times</em>, or watching one of the news talk shows, or listening to a TED talk on YouTube.</p> <p>Some UU churches put their whole service on YouTube. You can watch at home, on your own schedule. You don’t have to get out and rub shoulders with other people.</p> <p>And that points out the first, fairly obvious, answer to the question of why people attend and why they join: You attend because you <em>want</em> to be in the physical presence of other people. That’s not a cost, it’s a benefit. And you join because you want to be together with some of the same people over and over again, to recognize them and be recognized by them.</p> <p>There are a whole bunch of reasons you might want that, but the catch-all term for them is <em>community</em>. People come to UU churches looking for community.</p> <p>Sometimes community is nothing more complicated than just looking for friends. Judgmental people might think that motive sounds a little lightweight compared to saving your immortal soul or joining a side in the great cosmic battle, but personally, I’m not in a position to look down on it. </p> <p>My wife and I met John and Kathy Brackett [the Lakewood Ranch members who invited us to speak] in 1988 at a UU church in Lexington, Massachusetts. They went on to have children and we didn’t, so to a certain extent their kids became our kids. Through them, we experienced two decades worth of Halloween costumes and Christmas mornings and birthday parties and graduations. </p> <p>In fact, UU churches are where I met most of the people I consider my friends for life. If those relationships were all I had ever gotten out of Unitarian Universalism, it would still be a pretty good deal. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why, and your mileage may vary, but for me personally, UU congregations have a higher percentage of people I could imagine being friends with than any other groups I know.</p> <p>I consciously started taking advantage of that about 13 or 14 years ago. That childhood Lutheran church I mentioned in was in Quincy, Illinois, a town of 40,000 that is about a hundred miles from anyplace you’ve heard of. It’s not on the way to anywhere else, so unless that’s your destination, you’ll never see it.</p> <p>In adulthood, I came back about twice a year to see my parents. One day I was walking around the city, through the parks, past the town square where Lincoln and Douglas debated, when I thought about the fact that like myself, the people I knew from childhood and high school had almost all moved far away. So I had very few local connections of my own any more. And it dawned on me that someday my parents would die, and that when they did, I would never have any reason to come back here. That suddenly seemed tragic to me, as if some important part of my history was in danger of disappearing without a trace. </p> <p>So I decided I needed my own Quincy community. For a lot of reasons, I couldn’t pass as a Lutheran any more, but there was also a small Unitarian church that had been started by some Emersonians back in the 1800s. So I started going there whenever I was in town, and arranged to talk there if their calendar had an opening. I also went to social events, met people, and looked for friends.</p> <p>And wouldn’t you know, it worked. As my parents declined, I had to visit more and more often, and stay for longer stretches. Five years ago when my father died and I had to clean out the house and start settling the estate, I was in town for a couple of months. And that community took care of me as if I had been there forever. And now, years down the line, the future I was afraid of has not come to pass. My parents are gone, but I still have a relationship with my home town. I have people I care about there, and reasons to go back. And I do.</p> <p>So if your purpose in being here is nothing deeper or more complicated than just that you need more nice people in your life, I get that. </p> <p>But at the same time, I think the reason it works is that a Unitarian Universalist congregation is more than just a place where a lot of nice people hang out. It’s a community of shared values. I think John and Kathy welcomed us into their children’s lives not just because they liked us, but because we also were committed to the values they wanted Josh and Tory to learn. When I reached out to the Quincy Unitarians, in part they responded because they’re generous, hospitable people. But also I think they recognized, even as we were just meeting each other, that we shared something deep.</p> <p>It’s no small thing to carry in your imagination the vision of a world where the UU Principles can be taken for granted, where of course all people have worth and dignity, of course we practice justice and compassion, of course we all nurture the interdependent web. As a description of how the world is, it’s pretty naive. But as a vision of what could be, of what we could work towards and make happen, it’s powerful.</p> <p>Something else happens when you take seriously the distance between the world we live in and the world we hope for. If you think of yourself as just one person, alone, it’s overwhelming. Justice, democracy, the search for truth — what can I, by myself, do to bring any of that into reality? If the Unitarian Universalist vision is going to be anything more than just a pleasant daydream, we need allies. We need each other. </p> <p>That really came home to me the last time I was in Quincy, which was the weekend after the election — that same Sunday when Ian was listening to our minister back in Massachusetts. Months before, when I had volunteered to lead a service in Quincy on the second Sunday in November, I had pictured a very different situation than the one I found when I arrived in town on Thursday afternoon, not even 48 hours after we found out who our next president would be. </p> <p>Now, I don’t want to try to speak for all UUs — I’m taking advantage of that lack-of-authority-in-the-pulpit thing I mentioned a few minutes ago. But to me personally, last fall’s campaign felt like a continuous assault on my values and what I think of as Unitarian Universalist values. Day after day, I would hear that climate science is some kind of sinister conspiracy, that women often lie about sexual assault, that there is no racism worth talking about in America any more, that the international system in which America has 5% of the world’s population but consumes 25% of its resources — that system is actually rigged against us. When Mexicans come into this country and do our dirty jobs for less than minimum wage, they’re exploiting us. When I can buy inexpensive shirts at Walmart because people in Bangladesh are so desperate that they work in factories that could collapse on them at any time, and sometimes do, killing hundreds — that’s them taking advantage of me. </p> <p>Rather than encouraging people to see each other’s worth and dignity, we were told to fear and resent anyone who is different from us. If we’re native-born, we should fear immigrants. If we’re in an opposite-sex marriage, we should resent the same-sex couples who now have the same rights we do. If we’re from a Christian or Jewish background, we should fear Muslims. If we’re white, we should fear blacks, and be grateful that police are so willing to shoot them down if they seem to be getting out of line.</p> <p>For months, I had stayed calm by believing that America wasn’t really like that. These kinds of arguments came from a fringe group, a tiny minority. And then, they won. Suddenly, everything I had believed about my country and my fellow citizens seemed to be wrong.</p> <p>If I felt that way up in New England, the UUs in Quincy had it much, much worse. Quincy is precisely the kind of heartland small town journalists go to when they’re trying to understand the new right-wing populism. The county voted 3-to&#8211;1 for Trump, and the discrepancy in yard signs and bumper stickers was even larger. </p> <p>In the Boston suburbs, we speculated abstractly about the anger of the rural white working class. In Quincy, they looked at the neighbors and wondered: “How can these be the same people I’ve lived next to all these years?” If I felt challenged, they felt surrounded, encircled. Was it even still safe for them to have their own yard signs and bumper stickers? Was it safe to talk openly in public places where people you don’t know might overhear and respond? </p> <p>So when the congregation gathered that Sunday, they weren’t just looking to hear an interesting talk and hang around with some nice people. They needed to be together. They needed to look into each other’s eyes and see some hope and courage.</p> <p>That morning I had them do the same responsive reading we just did, so that they could hear themselves and hear each other proclaim what Unitarian Universalists stand for. In that time and place, it felt like a radical act. It felt like the beginning of resistance. </p> <p>And that, I believe, is also why we join. Because if I am alone, it is easy to become intimidated. It is easy to start thinking of UU values as just some funny ideas I have, that maybe I shouldn’t talk about too loudly. If I am alone, it is easy to fall into despair, to think “I used to have these visions of a better world, but it didn’t happen. What was I thinking? I used to try to change things, but wasn’t that stupid? I’m just one person. Why did I think that my thoughts, my beliefs, my values could change anything or should matter to anybody?”</p> <p>So yeah, it’s great to have friends. It’s good to have a pleasant place to go on a Sunday morning. It’s nice if somebody will provide interesting ideas to discuss over breakfast. </p> <p>But there’s a deeper reason to be a congregation. We come together to hold each other up through difficult times. On days when you are feeling intimidated, you can be with people who have courage. When you feel yourself slipping into despair, you can look into the eyes of people who still have hope. Maybe today I do that for you. Maybe tomorrow you do it for me.</p> <p>We join together because we are stronger that way. We need each other.</p>http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2017/02/why-be-congregation.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-7572262748209063134Fri, 03 Feb 2017 14:01:00 +00002017-02-03T09:25:05.162-05:00The Hope of a Humanist<p>presented at First Parish Church of Billerica on January 29, 2017<span style="font-family: Cochin; font-size: 14px; text-indent: 18px;"> </span></p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">A little over a week ago, we inaugurated a new president. It wasn’t a surprise; we’d known for months that event was coming. That election itself was a shock to a lot of people, myself included. But then we had some time to adjust.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">It probably won’t amaze you to learn that I was hoping someone else would win. Anybody my age has been on the losing side in many elections, but this one seemed different. I had never before felt so intensely that the vote was a referendum on my values, and on what I think of as Unitarian Universalist values. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">So losing hit me harder than just an ordinary partisan loss. It challenged my faith in my countrymen, my faith in democracy, and even my faith in the direction that history is going in my lifetime. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">In the last few months I’ve done a lot of traveling and talking to people, and I can report that I’m not the only UU who felt that way. I suspect that a number of you did also. (But in case some of you didn’t, I’m going to give you another way to get into this sermon in a minute. I hope you’ll bear with me until it comes around.)</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">I’ve been hearing two kinds of reactions. Some of us are energized now, feeling that history is putting us on the spot, and we need to respond. My editors at <em>UU World</em> feel that way, and so do a lot of the ministers I’ve talked to. Last Sunday at my home church in Bedford, our service centered on the dozens of members who had marched the day before, either in Boston or down in DC, and they seemed pretty energized. I gather that some of you marched as well.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">But I’ve also been hearing about an opposite reaction: a general deflation, a loss of energy, a loss of hope, a falling into despair. For some it manifests as a turning inward, a retreat into the personal: "The news can happen without me. The larger world will have to take care of itself for a while." A lot of us, I suspect, have bounced back and forth between those two reactions: I have to do something, and yet I can’t bear to think about it. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">This second reaction raises what I think is a very important question: When our hope gets damaged, how do we heal it? And this is where you can come back into this sermon, even if you don’t relate to the political angle. Because we all, from time to time, experience damage to our sense of hope: maybe from illness, or a career setback, or aging, or the breakup of a relationship, or some other misfortune. There are any number of ways that hope can get damaged, and we can find ourselves thinking: “Why do I bother? What is the point of trying to do anything?”</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Now, if you complain about this despair in front of your Christian friends, I can predict what they’ll say: "This is why you need to come back to God." Matthew 19:26 says “With God all things are possible.” So believers never have any reason to feel hopeless, no matter how bad the prospects look. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">The Bible offers many assurances that God will look out for you and intervene on your behalf. The 23rd Psalm says: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, I will fear no evil. For Thou art with me.” And Psalm 121 makes an even bolder promise: “The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep you from all evil.”</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Now, I think we all realize that promises like that often fail in this life. Christians and other believers, no matter how dedicated and devout, seem to suffer misfortunes at more-or-less the same rates as the rest of us. But even then, the afterlife gives hope a second chance. In Heaven, the scales of justice can be rebalanced, and happy endings appended to all earthly tragedies. At the Lutheran church I grew up in we used to sing:</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">What though the tempest rage,</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Heaven is my home;</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Short is my pilgrimage,</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Heaven is my home;</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">And time’s wild wintry blast</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Soon shall be overpassed;</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">I shall reach home at last,</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Heaven is my home.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">That answer works for a lot of people. I saw it work for my parents as they faced aging and death, and I could think of no good reason to try to talk them out of it. So if the promise of Heaven keeps you going through times of hardship, all I can say is: “Good for you."</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">But that doesn’t mean it works for me. To me, heavenly solutions seem a little too easy. All the scenes I would like to examine for evidence are conveniently off-stage. St. Paul says that faith is a gift of God. And while I’ve received a lot of gifts in my life, that wasn’t one of them. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">So where does that leave me? Or leave anyone who takes a more humanistic view of life?</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">There is a traditional Unitarian answer to the question of what hope can be based on. Back in 1886, James Freeman Clarke, probably the greatest Unitarian minister of his era, listed what he called <a href="http://www.tentmaker.org/articles/fivepoints.htm">the five points of the new theology</a>: "The fifth point of doctrine in the new theology will, as I believe, be the Continuity of Human Development in all worlds, or the Progress of Mankind onward and upward forever. ... The one fact which is written on nature and human life is the fact of progress."</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> So if you are experiencing a personal loss of hope, you just need to expand your scale and your time horizon to identify with the upward march of humanity. Those 19th-century Unitarians wrote their own inspirational hymns about the future they were building here on Earth.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Hail, the glorious golden city</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">pictured by the seers of old. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Everlasting light shines o’er it.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Wondrous things of it are told.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Who will live there? Their descendants, like maybe us.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">For a spirit then shall move them</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">we but vaguely apprehend.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Aims magnificent and holy</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">making joy and labor friend.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">Then shall bloom in song and fragrance</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">harmony of thought and deed,</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">fruits of peace and love and justice</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; text-align: center;">where today we plant the seed.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Like Clarke’s sermon, both of those progress-praising hymns were written before Auschwitz, before Hiroshima. James Freeman Clarke was a white male, living in a rising nation that seemed to have infinite potential, and ministering to a congregation of people who, by and large, were doing well. Optimism probably came easily to him, maybe a little too easily.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">But similar arguments have been made more recently in a more nuanced way. In <em>The Better Angels of Our Nature</em>, for example, Steven Pinker argues that human society has been getting less and less violent for thousands of years. Martin Luther King certainly had an appreciation of injustice and human suffering, but he often quoted another 19th-century Unitarian, Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” And King himself was identifying with future progress when he accepted that he might never see the freedom and equality he was fighting for, “I may not get there with you,” he said, “but I have been to the mountaintop.”</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Optimistic liberals today point to young voters, who seem to be less susceptible to traditional prejudices. As a group, they are less racist, less sexist, less homophobic, less xenophobic, and in general just less deplorable than their elders. Eventually, the world will belong to them, so there’s reason to be hopeful about the long-term political future.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Countering that, though, is the observation of the great 20th-century economist John Maynard Keynes, that in the long run we are all dead. In other words, having the long-term trend on your side might not be that comforting, if the short-term trend in the opposite direction seems likely to continue for a very long time. Even if history eventually vindicates me, will I live long enough to deliver my I-told-you-sos?</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">And of course when you’re feeling hopeless, you can point to plenty of negative trends. In a thermonuclear age, Pinker’s millennia of progress towards nonviolence could be wiped out in one bad day. Climate change looks ominous, and if you look way, way down the road, eventually the Sun expands and this whole planet burns.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">So as a reason to be hopeful, I wind up feeling about Progress much the same way that I feel about Heaven: If it works for you, that’s great. But I find that my faith in Progress deserts me when I need it most. When life is good, then “onward and upward forever” can sound pretty credible. But at times of defeat and despair and discouragement, it doesn’t.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Clarke’s faith in Progress is an example of a common first step as people abandon traditional religion: Their new worldview has a God-shaped hole in it, which they plug with a God-sized concept. Similarly, among early Marxists, the Revolution and the perfect Communist society to follow could sometimes sound a lot like the Second Coming and Christ’s millennial kingdom.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">But I think a more mature humanism involves a deeper rethinking, rather than just finding a human concept to plug into the hole left by a religious concept. Usually, that rethinking takes the form of eliminating the middleman: So for example, medieval philosophers used the patterns found in Nature as indications of how God’s mind worked, and then drew conclusions from that. But when modern science came along, it eliminated the middleman: It left God out and drew conclusions directly from the patterns in Nature. Similarly, traditional religious morality revolves around the question of what God wants from us, and it deduces right and just behavior from that. But humanistic morality just goes straight at the question of what is right and just.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">I want to do something similar with hope and despair. In dealing with a loss of hope, I think traditional religion goes the long way around: Faith in God leads to optimism about the future, which leads to hope in the present. And 19th-century Unitarianism takes the same long way round, but plugs Progress into the God-shaped hole: Our faith in Progress makes us optimistic about the future, so we can live hopefully in the present. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">I’d like to eliminate those middlemen, and think about hope more directly. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">So what is hope? I see hope as an experience in the moment, the feeling that it is worthwhile to try. It’s worthwhile to get out of bed in the morning. It’s worthwhile to speak to that person you don’t know. It’s worthwhile to apply for that new job or sign up for those new classes. It’s worthwhile to start turning your creative ideas into reality: writing that song or scripting that movie. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Hope gets intertwined with optimism, but they are not at all the same thing. Maybe while you’re writing that song, you keep yourself going by telling yourself that it’s going to be a hit and make you famous. But anybody who actually does write hit songs, or is successful in some other creative pursuit, will tell that those thoughts about the future just get in the way. Creating things is worthwhile because it just is; it’s a primary thing that you feel in the moment, not something you deduce from its prospects for success.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">We human beings put effort into all kinds of things that we know from the get-go are pointless: We play games, we solve puzzles. We do it just to experience the sense of striving, not to produce something for the future. When a crossword puzzle is complete, we will crow for a moment, and then throw it away.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">I see hope as that pure feeling of let’s-do-this. It doesn’t depend on judgments about the future. When my wife had cancer, she was optimistic and I was pessimistic — and wrong, as it turned out — but we both lived in hope. We both kept asking ourselves what we could do, and we felt that whatever we did to try to save her life was intensely important, whether it worked or not.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Hope is part of the natural equipment of a human being. Evolution built it into us because it helped our species survive. I imagine that proto-humans faced many discouraging situations through the ages. But some kept going anyway, and those are the ones who became our ancestors. They passed on to us this sense that we should do things, try things, and not give up.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">But like the rest of our natural equipment, our hope doesn’t always work right. Some of us are born with a hope disability. Others have a weak hope that wears out over time. Some people’s early life wasn’t conducive to healthy hope development. Those are all difficulties worth our attention on some future day.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">But what I want to focus on today is when a basically healthy hope gets injured by a traumatic event, the way that an accident might sprain your ankle or break your leg. Traditional religion tells you to approach that the long way around, by experiencing it as a loss of faith. Its prescription is to work on your relationship with God. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Humanism would have you eliminate that middleman, and look at your hope directly. You’ve been injured. How do you heal? How do you rehabilitate? </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Watching myself, and other UUs I know, deal with the trauma of the election, I think many of us did the right things more-or-less by instinct, and I wonder how many of us consciously or unconsciously applied the model of physical injury. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">When you sprain an ankle, you stop putting weight on it for a while. Similarly, many people’s reaction to the election was to stop paying attention to national affairs for a while, stop watching the news, stop participating in social-media forums where the election might be discussed, and change the subject when politics came up in their face-to-face conversations. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">If you did that, you may have felt guilty, as if a better or a stronger person wouldn’t have needed to retreat like that. And if you had sworn off the duties of citizenship forever, that might have been blameworthy. But just pulling back for a while was probably wise. In the first days after the election, the people I felt sorriest for were the ones who were clearly injured, but couldn’t step back, who couldn’t stop reading things that made them more and more miserable, and kept throwing themselves into bitter arguments that couldn’t possibly turn out well.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">But the injury metaphor tells you not just to rest, but to rehabilitate. And the first step there is usually to find the motions you can make without pain, and move those muscles so they don’t atrophy.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">And so, the people who had retreated from politics looked for other areas of life in which to exercise their hope: in projects around the house, in planning social events, in trying new things at work, or maybe something entirely frivolous, like a difficult jigsaw puzzle. It was important simply to work through the motions of hope: to visualize something you might do, to try it, and to see it work out well enough that you were glad you did it.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Before long, especially when you’re rehabilitating a complicated joint like a knee or a shoulder, you start taking it through the range of motion that hurts. But you do it first under controlled circumstances, and you do it with help. Maybe a therapist moves the arm for you, or you do your first exercises in a pool, letting the water absorb your weight. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">In the same way, those first forays back into public affairs were best taken under the watchful eyes of close friends whose recovery was a bit further along — settings where you wouldn’t be ashamed to wince or yelp, among people who would know when to slow down and move more carefully.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Eventually, when the injured part has mostly knit itself back together and you just need to get strong again, you seek out the support of a community. You join an exercise group or take a class at a gym. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Those of us who already belonged to UU churches had an advantage at this stage, because we had an obvious place to go. And I think a number of people whose previous connection to a UU church was a little shaky have drawn closer, recognizing their need for community support. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">For some, Saturday’s march was a search for community support; they came out to be reminded that they are not alone. But for others it represented a return to the full exercise of their hope. They envisioned showing up with a bunch of their friends, maybe with some creative costumes or signs. They took some action to bring that vision into reality, and it worked. They’re back in the political arena, and some are back stronger than ever.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Because that’s the ultimate goal of rehabilitation after injury: not just to return to a semblance of your previous life, but to come back stronger. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">Injury isn’t just a setback, it has a lesson to teach: The body doesn’t always take care of itself. It needs regular attention and maintenance. Similarly, maintaining healthy hope in your life doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a gift of God that we can just sit back and receive. Keeping your hope in a state of fitness that resists reinjury involves maintaining a good mental hygiene, observing what you take in and what you expose yourself to, watching to see what in your life builds your hope up and what tears it down. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">And most of all, healthy hope requires exercise. On a regular basis, we need to visualize worthwhile things, try them, and see them come to pass. Not just because the world needs good things to happen, but because we, for ourselves, need to make good things happen and see ourselves making good things happen. </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">So in conclusion, I want to urge you: If you have had or are having a crisis of hope, don’t take the long way around. Don’t approach it as a crisis of faith. Don’t get distracted into debates about optimism and pessimism. Some people believe in God and some don’t. Some people are optimists and some are pessimists. But any of them can learn to live hopefully in the present. There may be a God or not. Sometimes the optimists are right and sometimes the pessimists are right. But it’s always better to live in hope than to live in despair.</p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin; min-height: 17px;"> </p><p style="margin: 0px; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: Cochin;">So if it helps you to pray, feel free. If it comforts you to think about positive long-term trends, don’t stop on my account. But also take care of your hope the way you would take care of a knee or a shoulder or your lungs or your heart. Practice good hope hygiene. Break hope-defeating habits. And most of all, exercise your hope and keep it in shape. Going forward, let’s maintain a fit and healthy hope, both for ourselves and for the world.</p>http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-hope-of-humanist.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-5476480946734851538Mon, 12 Dec 2016 17:31:00 +00002016-12-12T13:10:36.433-05:00Season of Darkness, Season of Hope<div style="text-align: center;"><i>presented at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto on December 11, 2016</i></div><h4 style="text-align: left;">Chalice Lighting</h4><p>At times our light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us. -- Albert Schweitzer</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Centering Words</h4><p>You may not always have a comfortable life, and you will not always be able to solve all of the world's problems at once. But don't ever underestimate the importance you can have, because history has shown us that courage can be contagious, and hope can take on a life of its own. -- Michelle Obama</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Sermon</h4><p>Most of the time, some ceiling or roof blocks my view of the sky: in my apartment, my car, in stores, offices, churches, and just about anywhere else I go. Even when I’m outside, I don’t always remember to look up. Occasionally I check what the weather is doing or how much daylight is left. I might admire a beautiful sunset, or the Moon, or the stars on a particularly clear night. But I look at them the way I look at paintings in a museum. I contemplate them for a while and then I move on.</p><p>So while I am well acquainted with the sky, I don’t live with it the way my father did when he was farming, and certainly not the way ancient peoples did. Not many of us do anymore. And so it can be hard for us to grasp what the Winter Solstice must have meant centuries or millennia ago, when our culture’s mythic intuition was forming.</p><p>Our calendars tell us that the Solstice is about a week away, and of course we notice that days are shorter this time of year. But ancient peoples who lived with the sky as a constant companion would have seen much more than that. Even children must have noticed that the path the Sun takes across the sky was dropping ominously towards the horizon. And every child, at some time or another, must have asked the obvious question: "Is it going to keep dropping, until someday the Sun won’t bother to come up at all? What will happen to us if the Sun never comes back?"</p><p>Today, that question sounds even more childish, because are educated: We know about the solar system and the Earth’s tilted axis. We understand that the Sun’s shorter path across the sky does not mean that it is getting weaker or lazier. In the Southern Hemisphere, we know, days are bright and long now, and the tropics are as hot as ever. In short, the Sun is doing fine, however it might look from our angle. The Earth is in its usual orbit, and everything is right on schedule. The fear that the Winter Solstice might <i>fail</i> this year never really crosses our minds.</p><p>Millennia ago, it probably did. If you were that questioning child, no doubt your elders would reassure you: “The Sun always turns around about now. Wait a week or two, and you’ll see for yourself.”</p><p>But I wonder just how reassuring that was. I doubt it communicated the clockwork certainty we feel today. Probably it sounded like those somewhat less convincing reassurances we all get from time to time, like: “That fault line is stable.” or “People with your credentials always get good jobs.” or “America would never elect someone like that.” — reassurances that may have been true in living memory, but which come with no guarantees. “Maybe it has always been that way,” you think, “but is it going to be that way <i>this time</i>?”</p><p>So I imagine that ancient peoples of all ages watched the sky this time of year with a certain anxiety, believing, but not completely certain, that the age-old pattern would hold, and a cosmic catastrophe would be averted once again.</p><p>But of course, the pattern did always hold. Every year, the Sun’s arc across the sky stopped sinking and began to rise, the days got longer, and Spring eventually came. But no matter how many times you lived through it, I imagine that the Solstice never really lost its miraculous quality, because the mechanism behind it remained invisible.</p><p> And so it became that rarest of events: a predictable, regularly occurring <i>miracle</i>. In time, the Solstice came to represent something a little more abstract than just the promise of Spring: It was evidence that miracles were still happening. It symbolized the lesson that you should never lose hope, because situations that just seem to get worse and worse every day can turn around, even if you don’t see exactly what is going to turn them.</p><p>Over time, symbols and stories and holidays of hope clustered around this time of year: The Temple lights that should burn out, don’t. The Golden Child who will change all of our lives — whether it is the hero Mithras or the savior Jesus — is born. Even our secular Christmas mythology reflects this hope that things can turn around: Scrooge gets back his humanity. The Grinch’s heart grows three sizes. George Bailey discovers he actually is living a wonderful life.</p><p>And every year, we are encouraged to bring that hope into our own lives: Maybe an old friendship can be rekindled. Maybe that ancient family quarrel can be patched up. Whatever part of your life seems stuck or broken, you should give it one more try, because this is a time when things might turn around, even if you don’t necessarily see how. This season of darkness is also a magical season, a season of hope.</p><p>But what can Unitarian Universalists do with all that?</p><p>Hope is fine, I guess, but we don’t put much stock in magic, or in things that are supposed to turn around for no particular reason. We want to see the mechanisms.</p><p>We are also skeptical of saviors. When I was growing up Lutheran, we called this season Advent, and we sang:</p><blockquote class="tr_bq">O come, O come, Emanuel.<br />And rescue captive Israel<br />That mourns in lonely exile here<br />Until the Son of God appear.<br />Rejoice! Rejoice! Emanuel<br />Shall come to thee, O Israel.</blockquote><p>That tune is still in our UU hymnal, but we changed the words. Because we are a proud people, a people of action, and we don’t plead helplessly for someone to come save us, not even God.</p><p>A lot of us don’t believe in God, and even those of us who do probably don’t believe in the kind of God who steps into history and fixes things that humans have screwed up. At most, we might believe in the upward tilt of Progress, or in the Theodore Parker line that Martin Luther King liked to quote: “The arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”</p><p>Many of us don’t even believe that much. The universe simply does what it does, and whether it ultimately bends towards Heaven or Hell is beyond our knowing. Our so-called “progress” may lead to annihilation rather than paradise. Rather than grant us freedom, it may enable a tyranny more all-encompassing than even George Orwell could have imagined. Rather than evolve into an interconnected global village, the world may fragment into echo chambers that are increasingly suspicious of one another.</p><p>Instead of adventure and innocent fun, the literature of our young people is full of dystopian wastelands and zombie apocalypses and heroes who hope for little more than to survive with a few of their friends. And who can blame the young for dwelling on such dark scenarios? Aren’t they just bringing into popular culture the private fears their elders are reluctant to discuss? </p><p>So we can see the darkness, but where is this hope we are supposed to celebrate?</p><p>In order to present that hope to Unitarian Universalists well trained in doubt and skepticism, I’m going to need to take advantage of something else we do well: appreciate subtle distinctions. UUs can split hairs like nobody else, and I’m going to split a really important one right now.</p><p>So far I’ve been using the word <i>hope</i> interchangeably with the belief that things will get better. But those two notions aren’t the same at all. Believing that things will improve isn’t hope, it’s <i>optimism</i>. The opposite of optimism is <i>pessimism</i>, the belief that things will get worse. But the opposite of hope is something far more devastating than pessimism, it’s <i>despair</i>. To be in despair is to believe that it’s useless to try, because your actions don’t matter. Nothing can be done.</p><p>So here’s the hair splitting: Optimism and pessimism are beliefs about the future. Hope and despair are attitudes towards the present.</p><p>Pessimism is going to the plate in the ninth inning when your team is behind, assessing the situation, and concluding that you’re probably going to lose. Despair, on the other hand, would tell you not to bother taking your turn at bat, or if you do step into the batter’s box, to let the pitches go by without swinging, because what’s the point? What difference could it possibly make?</p><p>Hope is the opposite of that. Hope is that feeling deep within you that you are alive, and that in this particular time and place, the only thing you need to concern yourself with is what you do next. Hope means refusing to prejudge the situation, it means doing whatever you can think to do and then whatever happens will happen.</p><p>Optimism and pessimism both claim to know something, but hope thrives on the unknown. It focuses on those parts of the future that remain undetermined, and it says, “Let me see what I can do.”</p><p>Once you appreciate that distinction, I think you’ll agree that while some UUs are optimists and some are pessimists, we are, at our core, a hopeful people. We don’t claim to know the future. We throw ourselves into the unknown and we act, because we have a deep, abiding faith that actions matter.</p><p>People sometimes ask me, as they probably ask you, why Unitarian Universalists bother to form congregations at all. Why do we set our alarms on Sunday mornings, make ourselves presentable, and show up? After all, if you’re going to make up your own mind about the Big Questions and follow your own conscience, can’t you do that just as well at home? No UU Hell is waiting for the unchurched. No authority is going to condemn you if you sleep in. So why bother?</p><p>I suspect that these last few weeks, you’ve known exactly why you bother. We are now in a season of darkness in more ways than one. The values Unitarian Universalists cherish are challenged today in a way they have not been in my lifetime. We are told from the highest levels to fear the stranger, and blame our misfortunes on those least able to defend themselves: on immigrants and refugees and the poor. Those who are different are presented to us as threats to our well-being and our very way of life. Science, we are told, is just another bias, and compassion is weakness. Those we might previously have seen as victims are in fact just losers, people unworthy of our concern.</p><p>In the middle of this immense darkness, if all you can see is the small candle of goodwill that you carry yourself, then you may well fall into despair. Because no matter what you do or how hard you try, you cannot light the world. If you worry that your candle might really be the only one left, then you might do well to hide it, for fear of those who would snuff it out.</p><p>Or you could bring it here.</p><p>On the Sunday after the election, I was speaking in the place where I grew up, a small Midwestern town in a rural county that voted three to one for Trump. The Unitarian church there is small, but we drew a good crowd that day.</p><p>I don’t think people came to church that morning because they wanted to be jollied back into optimism. We gathered together for reassurance, but not the kind that says everything is going to be OK. (A lot of things are not going to be OK in the coming years. I think we all know that.) No, the reassurance we were looking for that morning, that I think many of us are still looking for, is to be in the presence of people who are not surrendering to despair.</p><p>I led the congregation in a responsive reading of the UU Principles, just so we could hear each other and hear ourselves say out loud what we stand for: the worth of all people; justice, equity, and compassion; acceptance of one another; the search for truth; democracy; world community; the interdependent web.</p><p>We’re not ready to give those things up, or to hibernate for a few years and let them take care of themselves. We don’t all have a plan yet. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do. Most of us are still casting about, trying to figure out what we <i>can</i> do, what roles we can play, where we might make some kind of difference. But UUs across the country are determined to do <i>something</i>, because we are a people who believe that our actions matter. We are a religion of hope.</p><p>We are also a religion of faith. Not necessarily faith in some perfect world after death. Not necessarily faith in an all-powerful God who makes our stories come out right. Not even faith that some great leader will ride in with the cavalry to save us in our hour of need. But we do have faith that the potential for human goodness is far more widespread than it often appears. That flame you feel inside yourself, that desire to live in a more just and compassionate world, that willingness to make an effort and take some chances to help bring that world about — it also burns inside other people, including many you would never suspect. An old-time Universalist like Hosea Ballou would tell you that if you could look deeply enough, you would see that flame burning somewhere inside everyone. </p><p>You can never predict when or how it will shine through. Several years ago, I was worried about my wife, who was facing a life-threatening cancer she eventually recovered from, and so I did not notice that I had picked up a virus myself. It hit me suddenly one afternoon in our local mall, and I dragged myself to Food Court to sit down and try to recover enough energy to drive home. But instead I just felt worse and worse. Looking around, I saw only strangers, no one I could ask for help. So I decided to make a run for the bathroom, hoping to be sick there rather than in front of everyone.</p><p>But when I stood up, I keeled over, and woke up a minute or two later on the floor with people all around me. The man at the next table had caught me as I fell, and an impromptu emergency response team had formed around me. Mall security had been notified, 911 had already been called, and an ambulance was on its way.</p><p>When I had looked around at all those strangers, I had not seen that level of caring, that willingness to get involved and help. But it was there.</p><p>That is a story of personal caring, but history is also full of moments when caring for the public good has burst forth, seemingly from nowhere: when crowds have faced down armies, when workers have stood together in unions, when citizens have marched together in support of civil rights or against war, and very recently when Native Americans and their allies from across the country — including a sizable contingent of UU ministers — came together at Standing Rock.</p><p>Hope thrives on the unknown, and we do not know what depths of goodness and courage might be hidden inside the American people. During this past year, it has been hidden pretty well sometimes. Sometimes I have felt that I didn’t know this country at all. But it is the faith of a Universalist that human goodness does not die just because it is hidden, any more than the Sun dies when it sinks behind the horizon.</p><p>If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that our own goodness is hidden sometimes. We haven’t always done what we could have done. We haven’t always spoken up when we should have. In hindsight, I suspect, most of us can look back at times when we were on the wrong side of some important issue. (I know I can.) But the goodness inside us didn’t die in those moments, it was just obscured by ignorance, or by fear, or maybe just by exhaustion.</p><p>It is the faith of Universalist to give others the same benefit of the doubt that we need for ourselves. And it is the faith of a Universalist to believe, as Michelle Obama said, that actions of courage, of generosity, and of inspiration are contagious.</p><p>The challenge of a season of darkness is to start such contagions and to spread them. If you step forward, you do not know who will follow you. Maybe it will be people you never would have expected.</p><p>In terms of optimism, I can offer you only the vaguest reassurance. Human history shows that things do not go on getting worse forever. Eventually they turn, and the moments when they turn are hardly ever obvious at the time. Even decades later, historians are usually still arguing about them. Right now, we could be closer to a turning point than anyone suspects, or it could still be a long way off. I don’t know.</p><p>One thing I can guarantee you: In a season of darkness, whatever you can think to do will seem totally inadequate to the immensity of the situation. What does it matter if I wear a safety pin? Or correct that fake news story my friend posted to Facebook? Or put a Black Lives Matter sticker on my car? Or sit next to that kid who’s being bullied? Or call that congressman? Or go to that demonstration? Or work for that candidate? Or run for that local office? How is that going to turn the world around?</p><p>And the answer is: We don’t know. By itself, nothing you do will turn things around. You cannot light the world.</p><p>But we also do not know how much hidden goodness is out there, and how it might reveal itself. If you do that thing that it occurs to you to do, you do not know who will see it and be inspired by it, or what you yourself might learn from it, or what either of you might go on to do next.</p><p>Here, in a time of darkness, we choose to act, but we do not know what will come from that action. We cannot know. And so, we hope.</p>http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2016/12/season-of-darkness-season-of-hope.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-6409268225057823266Tue, 15 Nov 2016 15:21:00 +00002016-11-15T10:21:58.961-05:00A Post-Election MeditationWhen I led the service at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on the Sunday after the election, I read this meditation (after apologizing to anybody who was feeling happy that morning).<br /><br />When something bad and unexpected happens, it hurts.<br /><br />That pain is part of the mind’s normal functioning, its healthy process of keeping order. Those buzzing expectations of things that now are not going to happen need to be switched off and unplugged. Hopes that have become hopeless need to be boxed up and returned to storage. Through this process, space is made for new plans and new hopes and new expectations, even if we can't yet imagine what they’re going to be.<br /><br />And while all this is happening, we hurt.<br /><br />&nbsp;It’s tempting not to let this process play out. It’s tempting to skip past the period of adjustment and jump straight into new action. It’s tempting to skip past the time of hurting and leap into anger at those we blame for our misfortune.<br /><br />Sometimes it’s even tempting to turn that anger on ourselves, to goad ourselves into ever-deeper levels of guilt and recrimination: “If I had done this. If I hadn’t done that. Why did I let my hopes get so high? Shouldn't I have known better?”<br /><br />And while we’re running in circles, and raging, and recriminating, that inner work remains undone.<br /><br />So right now, let’s take a moment to sit with our pain and disappointment. Not goading it on, not telling it to go away, not trying to jump over it. That pain has work to do. Let that work be done.<br /><br />Someday, maybe sooner than you think there will be a time for new plans, a time for new action, and even a time for new hopes. But all that will happen much better, after the debris has been cleared away. http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2016/11/a-post-election-meditation.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-8888723052153311232Wed, 12 Oct 2016 15:45:00 +00002016-10-12T12:00:10.364-04:00A Church That Would Have You as a Member<p>Back in 2010, the <em>New Humanism</em> online magazine asked me if I’d write an article introducing Unitarian Universalism to Humanists. I sent them a text titled “Unitarian Universalism: A Church for Humanists?”, which they posted under the title “A Church that Would Have You as a Member”. </p><p>So far so good. But recently it has been pointed out to me that the <em>New Humanism</em> web site no longer exists, and so links that used to point to my article now go to some page that’s trying to sell you something unrelated. I’ve googled lines out of my draft and haven’t gotten any hits, so I don’t think the article has moved somewhere else.</p><p>So I’m going to repost it here. I didn’t keep track of my agreement with <em>New Humanism</em>, so it’s possible I’m violating copyright by doing so. If so, and if that bothers whoever has a right to be bothered, they should just leave a comment. I’ll happily take this post down if you can point to somewhere else on the internet where the article can be found.</p><p>Bear in mind: What I have in my records is the article as I sent it to them, so it’s missing whatever edits they might have made, for better or worse. I fixed a mistake. (James Barrett died in 1994, not 2003.) Also, I’ve had to fix the links, which may not go to the original places anymore, but should go somewhere relevant. Anyway, here it is:</p><hr /><hr /><p><strong>A Church That Would Have You as a Member</strong></p><p>Unitarian Universalism has long had a unique relationship with Humanism. What other religious group would showcase an outspoken atheist at its national convention, as the UUs did when they invited Kurt Vonnegut to give prestigious annual Ware Lecture at the General Assembly of 1984? UU Humanists have their own national organization (HUUmanists) with their own journal (<em>Religious Humanism</em>). In a 1998 survey, nearly half of UUs identified themselves as Humanists. <em>New Humanism</em>'s publisher Greg Epstein spoke at the 2008 General Assembly, and has been invited to speak again in 2010.</p><p>Unitarians were largely responsible for the first Humanist Manifesto, and in his 2002 book <em>Making the Manifesto</em>, former Unitarian Universalist Association President (and the AHA's Humanist of the Year for 2000) William Schulz claimed that there were more Humanists in UU churches than in the American Humanist Association. </p><p>Few other religious organizations have so consistently stood with Humanists in those battles where traditional morality and human rights take opposite sides. The lead plaintiffs in the Massachusetts same-sex marriage case <a href="http://archive.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/05/10/unitarians_prepare_to_marry_gays?pg=full">took their vows at the Boston headquarters of the Unitarian Universalist Association</a>, with then-UUA President William Sinkford officiating. About a hundred UU ministers -- a significant fraction of the entire UU clergy -- marched with Martin Luther King in Selma in 1965, and the murder of one of them (<a href="http://www.uua.org/re/tapestry/adults/river/workshop5/175806.shtml">James Reeb</a>) provided the white martyr that President Johnson needed when he urged Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. Another UU (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/30/us/death-doctor-overview-abortion-doctor-bodyguard-slainin-florida-protester.html?pagewanted=all">James Barrett</a>) was murdered in 1994 while trying to protect an abortionist from religious-right violence. Linus Pauling, the two-time Nobel laureate who led an international groundswell of scientists pushing for a nuclear test-ban treaty (and co-founded the International League of Humanists) was a UU.</p><p>UU General Assemblies have passed <a href="http://www.uua.org/liberty/religionstate/41771.shtml">more than a dozen resolutions supporting the separation of church and state</a>. People for the American Way founder Norman Lear was another Ware lecturer in 1994, and a Unitarian Universalist (<a href="http://www.uuworld.org/articles/pete-starks-untroubled-humanism">Pete Stark</a>) was the first congressman to announce in public that he did not believe in God. </p><p>Small wonder, then, that when Humanists go looking for a like-minded community -- a place to raise a child in humanistic values, look for social-action allies, solemnize a wedding or funeral, or perhaps just be reminded once a week that American consumer culture is not the only alternative to God -- the local Unitarian Universalist church is a prime option. There are about a thousand UU churches around the country (far more than Ethical Culture societies or other Humanist-friendly groups), and you can find at least one in every state of the union.</p><p>But is the humanist-community problem really that simple? Should we all just go join UU churches? As a Unitarian Universalist myself -- I am, in fact, more comfortable identifying myself as a UU than as a Humanist -- I wish I could make that sweeping recommendation in good conscience. But while many Humanists are happy as UUs, many others are not, and every year some number of UU-Humanists stomp out the door in disgust. </p><p>So would you be a contented parishioner or a stomper-out-the-door?</p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p>Probably the best way to get a handle on UUism is to understand where it comes from. Believe it or not, the story (or at least the Unitarian branch of the UU family tree) starts with the Puritans. When they came to the New World in the 1600s, the Puritans weren't any kind of Humanists or even particularly liberal Christians. But Puritan churches lacked two features that anchor religious institutions against the progressive forces of evolution: They didn't have a creed and they didn't have a hierarchy. </p><p>Each local congregation was supposed to read the Bible for itself, and no external authority could force a congregation to read it any particular way. Puritans believed that an external authority was unnecessary, because the Holy Spirit would keep pulling congregations back to Christian truth. What happened instead was that many of those congregations drifted towards liberalism. </p><p>The drift was gradual, but over the centuries the small changes added up. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, people like William Ellery Channing started interpreting the Bible according to reason rather than tradition, and noticed that some of the more unreasonable Christian doctrines, like the Trinity, were also un-Biblical. So they affirmed the unity rather than the trinity of God and became known as Unitarians.</p><p>By the middle of the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson was challenging the uniqueness of the Bible itself, which he saw as the record of one people's inspiration. People in other times and places (like us here and now) might hope for their own divine inspiration. And if that was the goal, why not look to Nature or Art rather than to scripture?</p><p>From there, each generation of Unitarians became a little more humanistic than the last, until by 1920 Unitarian minister Curtis Reese could announce to his colleagues (in public, no less) that God was "philosophically possible, scientifically unproved, and religiously unnecessary."</p><p>The fact that Cotton Mather was not rolling over in his grave was, in itself, powerful evidence against the Afterlife.</p><p>Reese-style Unitarian Humanism was controversial for about a generation, but by the time of the merger with the Universalists in 1961, it was the majority point of view in most UU churches. Since then things have drifted in a different direction, which we'll get to in a few paragraphs.</p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p>This unique history explains the otherwise bizarre combination of features you will find in a typical UU church. If you walk into a UU Sunday-morning service wearing earplugs, you might imagine you are in a Christian church. Families arrive together and children go to their classes. Adults stand up or sit down in unison. Sometimes they sing together or read something out of the hymnal together. There might be a choir and an organ. Candles might be lit. More often than not, a minister will stand up and give something that might be called a "talk" or an "address," but looks an awful lot like a sermon.</p><p>UUs might appear to be imitating the more popular Christian denominations, but they're not. Like the evolutionary product it is, UUism comes by all that stuff honestly through a common ancestor -- the same way that dolphins get their lungs.</p><p>No matter how naturally those Christian trappings arise, though, they provide the first test of whether you'll be happy as a UU: If they drive you crazy, independent of the the service's intellectual content, then your life as a UU will be difficult. Don't torture yourself.</p><p>But if you can tolerate the appearances -- I've grown to like them myself -- then take out your earplugs and listen. You'll hear a message that is not always capital-H Humanist, but is decidedly humanistic: People of goodwill need to look past their disagreements about metaphysics and start fixing the world -- where fixing means creating the conditions for human happiness and fulfillment here and now, not preparing our invisible souls for some higher happiness after death. The world's many scriptures are read for inspiration, not for authoritative pronouncements, so a UU discussion doesn't end when someone quotes the Bible. Prayer is a community meditation on human needs and desires, not a request for supernatural favors. Science's description of the physical world is accepted, and while UUs may at times be skeptical about whether technology is creating a Heaven or a Hell for us, they completely understand and sympathize with the scientist's desire to solve whatever earthly mysteries might be solvable. Unlike Bluebeard's castle, a UU universe has no locked rooms.</p><p style="text-align: center;">*</p><p>Before you say "sign me up," though, you need to consider the continuing drift of recent decades. There was a moment in the 1960s or 70s when Unitarian Universalism might have become an unofficial Church of Humanism. Humanism was clearly the dominant philosophy and all forms of traditional religion were in retreat. Many UUs felt that their centuries-long evolutionary journey was done now: They had shaken off the barnacles of orthodox Christianity and had arrived at Humanism.</p><p>Many still feel that way, but the community as a whole has gone in a different direction. Particularly among the ministry, there is a trend to view traditional religion not as an encrustation to be shaken off, but as a resource to be mined. The solid shore of Humanism is largely taken for granted, but from that shore many 21st-century UUs dive back into religion, to see what can be salvaged: community-building rituals, teaching stories, techniques of personal transformation, invocations of awe and wonder, and so on.</p><p>And so, religious words that once seemed to be on their way out -- <em>worship</em>, <em>prayer</em>, <em>God</em>, <em>holy</em>, <em>sacred</em>, <em>salvation</em>, <em>divine</em>, and many others -- are on the upswing again. If you tap on those words, if you ask what UUs are trying to get at by using them, chances are you'll hear an explanation largely compatible with an underlying Humanism. But if you view the words themselves as the carriers of a dangerous infection, you'll find today's UU churches to be unhygienic environments. </p><p>Finally, UU congregations are tolerant to a fault. Literally anyone can show up at a UU church, believing any kind of craziness, and will not be told to go away. (In fact, if you take it on yourself to tell someone he or she doesn't belong, you are the one who is likely to be reprimanded.) If you mingle at the coffee hour after the Sunday service, you may run into astrologers, crystal gazers, faith healers, and new-agers of all varieties. They won't be anywhere close to the majority and most of them don't stay more than a few months. But if one such encounter ruins your whole week, you won't be a happy camper.</p><p>In short, if you are allergic to the appearances and words of traditional religion, Unitarian Universalism is not for you. If you are looking for a community of pure and unadulterated Humanism, you won't find it at a UU church.</p><p>But if you want to be accepted for the Humanist you are, without any fudging or hypocrisy, you can have that. If you want allies in the struggle to make the world a better place, you can find them. If you are stimulated by diverse points of view and enjoy engaging people who frame the world differently (but not too differently), a UU church is a good place to meet them.</p><p>If you came to my church, you'd be welcome. You might be happy there, or you might not. Only you can judge.</p>http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2016/10/a-church-that-would-have-you-as-member.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-473777884658900927Thu, 05 May 2016 13:07:00 +00002017-01-28T06:21:02.291-05:00The Holiday of Rising Energy<p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><em>presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on May 1, 2016</em></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><strong>Opening Words</strong></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The opening words are from <em>Camelot</em>:</p><blockquote style="font-size: 21px;"><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It’s May! It’s May!</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The lusty month of May. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That lovely month when everyone goes blissfully astray.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It’s here! It’s here!</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That shocking time of year.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">When tons of wicked little thoughts merrily appear.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It’s May! It’s May!</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The month of great dismay.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">When all the world is brimming with fun,</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Wholesome or un.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It’s mad! It’s gay!</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">A libelous display!</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Those dreary vows that everyone takes,</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Everyone breaks.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Everyone makes divine mistakes</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">In the lusty month of May.</p></blockquote><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><strong>Responsive Reading</strong></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">(by Henry David Thoreau)</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life?</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I do not wish to live what is not life, living is so dear.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Nor do I wish to practice resignation, unless it is quite necessary.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I want to cut a broad swath, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">If it proves to be mean, then to get to the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><strong>Meditation</strong></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I want you to imagine that you are two years old, and running is something you have just recently gotten good at. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">All the energy that someday will animate a big clunky adult body is already in you right now. It's been compressed down into a tiny package, and you’re just bursting with it. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Adults are always so tired and slow. They plop down into a chair or a couch and it seems so hard for them to move. But for you, it’s hard <em>not </em>to move. There’s so much energy in you, you just can’t bottle it up. So you run.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">You’re not going anywhere, you’re not racing anybody, you’re just running. You run out to the fence and then run back. You chase the cat. You run around the swing set and then run around it again.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Do you know how amazing running is? Running <em>changes the wind</em>. The day can be perfectly still, but you run and suddenly there is wind in your face and your hair lifts off your ears and streams out behind you. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And there’s one more thing you can try that just might work. You’ve seen older kids do it and it looks so unbelievable: You could jump.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Jumping is like running, but you don’t put a foot down to catch yourself. You get going really fast, and then you just pick your feet up and let yourself be in the air. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">You’ve tried it before and it hasn’t worked, you screwed the timing up or something. But that was days ago, when you were practically still a baby. You’re faster now, and this time maybe you can do it. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">So you go to the top of that little incline and start running down. You push it harder than you ever have before, and when you think you just can’t go any faster you give one last push and pick up your feet. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">You’re in the air.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It probably doesn’t look like much to anyone else. You don’t get very high. You don’t go very far. But for one timeless instant you are off the ground, touching nothing but air. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It’s like flying.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><strong>Readings</strong></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Arguing with that spirit of May and Thoreau's ambition to suck the marrow out of life<br /> is the belief that a truly enlightened person, someone of broad vision, would know that it’s all pointless. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That child who runs in circles is, after all, running in circles. She’s not getting anywhere, and her feeling that what she’s doing is intensely meaningful and important is just one of those illusions that people are prone to. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">To this mindset, what it means to grow up and get educated is that you expand your scale of reference beyond your self-centered frame; maybe all the way out to the Infinite and the Eternal. And when you do that, you inevitably see the sheer insignificance <br /> of anything human beings might ever achieve.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Shelley expressed that nihilistic view in his poem <em>Ozymandias</em>.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I met a traveller from an antique land</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Tell that its sculptor well those passions read</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And on the pedestal these words appear --</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Nothing beside remains. Round the decay</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The lone and level sands stretch far away.' </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But the curmudgeonly statement that has had the most influence in Western culture comes from the Bible. According to tradition, the Book of Ecclesiastes was the last thing written by Solomon, the wisest of the kings of Israel. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">“All is vanity,” he says, and it is foolish to think you are going to accomplish something that will last. Because the scale of the universe is utterly beyond you.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? A generation goes, <br /> and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down and hurries to the place where it rises again. The wind blows to the south <br /> and goes around to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow there they continue to flow. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">All things are wearisome more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing or the ear filled with hearing. What has been will be, and what has been done is what will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Is there a thing of which it is said, "See, this is new"? It has already been in the ages before us. The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Ecclesiastes is the voice of the old man who has seen it all and done it all and lived long enough to realize that it was all pointless. He pursued every possible pleasure, acquired every kind of possession, built great works, ruled over a kingdom. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and again, all was vanity and a chasing after the wind.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Even then, you might think: Oh, but reaching that place of grand perspective — that must have been satisfying. Solomon denies us even that consolation. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 36px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">This also is but a chasing after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px 27.9px; text-indent: -27.9px; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><strong>Talk</strong></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">When Ellen asked me to speak on May 1st, I warned her that the first word of the talk might be: <em>Comrades! </em></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Because Mayday is famous as the holiday of revolution. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union would hold huge Mayday parades in Red Square, demonstrations of military might <br /> that promised the eventual triumph of the workers’ revolution over capitalist oppression.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But the connection between Mayday and the workers' struggle actually predates the Soviets. Here in the United States in 1885, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions threatened a general strike across the country if the 8-hour day didn’t become standard by May 1st. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The unions weren't really strong enough to pull off a nationwide strike, but some large cities did see several days of strikes and marches. In Chicago, a confrontation with police response became the Haymarket Riot, for which several labor organizers were sentenced to death. In subsequent years, the American labor movement held demonstrations on Mayday to honor the martyrs of Haymarket. The European socialist community, and eventually the Russians, picked it up from us.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But as the opening words reflected, Mayday celebrations predate the labor movement too. They go all the way back to the pagan festival of Beltane. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Beltane is the holiday of rising energy, and falls halfway between spring equinox and summer solstice. In the British Isles, where I think the growing season <br /> runs a few weeks behind what we see here in central Illinois, Beltane marked the beginning of the season of generativity, the lusty month of May. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Beltane is a celebration of potential. In the same way that the meditation envisioned all the energy of an adult body compressed inside a two-year-old who just has to run, at Beltane the lushness and bounty of July and August and September is imagined as already existing in the Earth, waiting to explode into manifestation through these tiny sprouts and buds. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">To quote another show tune, by the end of the lusty month of May, June will be busting out all over. Because all the ram-sheep and the ewe-sheep are determined there’ll be new sheep.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And so on Beltane, a maiden would be crowned Queen of the May, and would lead her village in raising a Maypole, (which is basically just a giant phallus), to remind everybody that, yeah, it’s <em>that </em>time of year. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It’s time to renew your fire — literally. Communities kindled a central bonfire, and households extinguished all their hearths and stoves and candles to relight them from the new flame. People would ritually walk between fires or jump over fires. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Young couples would have sex in the fields, partly to participate in the energy of the season, and partly as sympathetic magic, to make sure the plants were getting the right idea: It’s time to be fruitful and multiply.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Independent of Haymarket or any other anniversaries, it makes a certain symbolic sense that Mayday becomes the holiday of revolution. In the same way that a farmer might see the crops of the fall already existing as potential in the sprouts and buds of May, a 19th-century revolutionary might look at the discontented miners, the secret workers’ study groups, and the fledgling union organizing committees, and see the sprouts and buds <br /> of a fully realized socialist society, where working people would not just make a subsistence wage, but would enjoy all the fruits of their labor. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Society might only have made it to May, but the imagination of a revolutionary can see August and September and October, when everything comes to fruition. All the energy needed to make that happen is already here, if we could only channel it and rise up.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Mayday is also the holiday of adolescence and first love, of the May Queen and her partners in the dance. When we use the calendar to symbolize a lifetime, May represents the adolescent. In the same way that the shoots and buds of May are ready to burst out into every kind of grain and fruit and flower, adolescents are ready to burst out into every kind of role and profession. Just as physical energy wells up inside toddlers, emotional energy and sexual energy and social energy wells up in adolescents, yearning to erupt into the world and become something. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Adolescence is a time of almost pure potential, neither anchored by manifestation nor disillusioned by experience. Nothing has happened yet, but everything seems possible, <br /> even things that appear impractical to their more prudent elders. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Two and a half centuries ago, Adam Smith observed, “The contempt of risk, and the presumptuous hope of success, are in no period of life more active than at the age at which young people choose their professions.” </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">If I’m 17, I could still rule the world someday, or I could fail totally and be a complete nonentity. Day to day, and sometimes even hour to hour, an adolescent’s expectations can swing from one extreme to the other. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">That unfulfilled potential is also the source of young people’s enviable resilience. A teen-ager’s dreams can crash and burnin a way that would be devastating in middle age. But in a week or two there can be new dreams, because the energy of life just keeps rising up, and it has to go somewhere. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But what about those of uswho aren’t in the May of our lives? What should Mayday or Beltane mean to us?</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">In a few months I’m going to turn 60, which puts me in the October of life. By October, the harvest might not all be gathered in yet, but you can pretty well see the shape of it. All around me, friends are retiring, or retired already, or bringing their careers in for a landing. Friends who raised children have seen those children graduate, and maybe even marry and have children of their own. If I'm hearing someone's plans for bigger and better things than they’ve ever done before, I'm probably talking to one of those children I watched grow up, and not to anyone my own age.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Physically, the late 50s are a period of decline. So, for example, I still go out for runs. But not with the idea that I’m going to go faster or further than ever before. Instead, I’m just trying to hang on to my vitality as long as I can. I run cautiously, with my medical insurance card in my pocket, in case I injure myself. I’ve gotten very far away from that two-year-old who runs just for the thrill of running.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">By your late 50s, the rituals of Beltane have lost a lot of their appeal. Jumping over a bonfire seems like an unnecessary risk. And even the fantasy of sex in the fields sounds inconvenient and probably uncomfortable.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But getting older isn't the only reason a person may not feel like celebrating a season of unbridled potential and explosive growth. At any age, the future might not be filling you with anticipation. Maybe, instead, you’re facing defeat or recovering from failure or grieving for someone you’ve lost. Maybe the bright green cheerfulness of May doesn’t excite you, so much asit mocks your lack of excitement.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Yes, energy is rising out there in the world, but what has that got to do with me?</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">At such times, it is tempting to echo the curmudgeonly attitude of Ecclesiastes: Yeah, I tried all those things that people get so whipped up about, and I was even good at some of it, but now I’ve risen above all that. I’ve gotten wise enough to see that it was all pointless. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The child runs for the thrill of feeling the wind in her hair, and the old man says, “Vanity, vanity. It’s all just chasing the wind.” What does it matter than I ran and I jumped? That I ate good food and saw beautiful sunsets? That I built things or made things or owned things? That I read thick books and thought grand thoughts? The wind continues to blow this way and that, the rivers never manage to fill up the sea, and there is no new thing under the sun, or at least nothing that anybody will remember after a generation or two. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But while I was preparing for this talk I re-read Ecclesiastes. (It’s short, you can do it in one sitting.) And this time, Solomon (or whoever the author really was) seemed to have a different message for me. He wasn’t trying to beat down my hopes or disparage my drive. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Instead, he was warning me not to try to justify my life through some external result. Because ultimately, the result of life is death. And if I think I can rise above that biological reality by getting rich or becoming famous or writing a book or building a company or even founding a dynasty, in the long run it’s not going to work. Because sooner or later the deserts return and the sands cover whatever we make. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Life is not a story where things work out in the end; in the end we die, and so does everybody we teach or help or influence. So the place where life needs to work out is in the middle. The point of life has to be in the living of it.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">This time, Ecclesiastes wasn’t telling me to rise above life and all the silly things people do. Quite the opposite, it was saying that the two-year-old has it right. It’s fine to imagine <br /> that you’re running to somewhere and that something wonderful will happen when you get there. But the best reason to run is for the joy of running.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Now, this point of view has gotten the reputation of being immature or unsophisticated. The sophisticated point of view is supposed to be that of the pessimist or the cynic. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But I think that’s because we describe it badly. The examples we usually give are like the one I just used: the two-year-old, the innocent. In the archetypes of the Tarot, the card that represents the joy of life is the Fool, who is happily striding towards the edge of a cliff. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Or we say “Eat, drink, and be merry” — something else sophisticated curmudgeons can feel superior to: Just indulge your animal desires, because if you thought about things at all, you’d realize that life is pointless and you’d get depressed. The attempt to enjoy life on the terms that it offers is sometimes portrayed as denial, like the partiers in “The Masque of the Red Death” who dance ever more frantically the clearer it becomes that something is horribly wrong.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But the physical pleasures of motion or consumption just symbolize the joy of life; they aren’t the whole story. In fact, there is no pinnacle of cold wisdom that rises above joy the way that an icy mountaintop rises above the treeline. Life-affirming experiences are possible at every level of consciousness. So on this holiday that celebrates possibilities, let’s recall a few of them.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Just as you can identify with your body and completely submerge yourself in whatever is happening physically, you can also identify with the role you’re playing, and for a period of time you can just <em>be </em>that role. For a moment or an hour or an afternoon, you just <em>are </em>a teacher or a healer or a friend. Sometimes doing the right thing, fighting for justice or uncovering the truth can give you a feeling of being exactly where you’re supposed to be, independent of how things ultimately work out. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Maybe you’re doing something entirely mundane, something you’ve done a thousand times before. You’re a plumber looking for a leak or a carpenter framing a house or a chef making a sauce, but you lose yourself in the activity, and for a while that’s all you need. Or maybe this moment is special. You are the father of the bride, or the grandmother who has brought the family back together for one perfect Thanksgiving.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Just as you can run for the joy of running, you can also think for the joy of thinking. Maybe you’re making the breakthrough that completes the Grand Theory of Everything or maybe you’re just working on the Sudoku puzzle in <em>The Herald Whig</em>. But you experience your mind in motion and it feels good. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Sometimes you can even blow your mind. Two or three ideas you’d always kept in their own little boxes turn out to be related, and suddenly a vast new landscape stretches out in front of you, and you have no idea how far it goes. The intricacy of the Universe is just more wonderful than you had ever imagined.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">There are epiphanies of beauty. Sometimes you find them in the natural world when you look out at a sunset or up at the stars or down into a microscope. Sometimes you find them in the arts, when a painting or a sculpture hits you just right. Or you listen to a poem or a song or symphony for the hundredth time, but this time you really hear it. Such moments don’t have to mean something or lead anywhere. They just are.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">There are mystical epiphanies, when you see the world in a grain of sand and discover that you love it, when you have compassion for every being that suffers, or when you make contact with a grace so enormous that it forgives everything.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And if you believe the mystics, they have maps of human experiences that keep on going from there. To tell the truth, I have no clue what some of those higher spheres or upper chakras are supposed to do. But those who claim to have experienced them describe them as bliss. There is no wisdom so advanced or enlightenment so grand, that all the joy of living is now beneath you.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">So those of us who might have trouble identifying with May right now, whether because of physical decline or some other reason, if we refuse to become curmudgeons, if we refuse to use Mayday as an excuse to look down on these foolish teen-agers with all their dancing and flirting and impractical ambitions, how should we celebrate the holiday of rising energy?</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I suggest that we take a broader view of what the season represents and what it might mean to us. There is a virtuous cycle, in which the energy of life rises up in you and through you. And if it manages to express itself as joy, a circuit gets completed that draws up new energy. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">There are times when that process seems so easy. Energy becomes joy becomes energy, <br /> round and round, as if it were happening on its own and didn’t require your attention at all. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But yes, there are other times, when energy and joy will not come to you no matter how loudly you call. You go through the motions of the activities that used to invoke the joy of life, but nothing happens. Poetry is boring and puzzle-solving is drudgery and every role you know feels like a trap you can never escape from. Sometimes your compassion is burned out, and even good food just makes you nauseous. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Eat, drink, and be merry indeed! As if things were just that simple.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">And if someone suggests that a life-affirming experience is supposed to be available here ... that just increases the frustration and anger and despair that comes from not finding it.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">One sunny day a year or so before he died, I picked my father up at Sunset Home and drove him out to the farm my grandfather bought almost a century ago, the one my father grew up on and still owned and had worked for most of his life. We looked at the fields, the crops, and the machinery, and he seemed to enjoy himself. But the next time I offered he didn’t want to go. He said it would just remind him of all the things he couldn’t do any more.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">So how should we celebrate the holiday of rising energy if our own energies aren't rising? Perhaps Mayday could be a time of taking stock. Where does joy still manifest in our lives, and how can we help that process along? </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It may not be happening where we’ve been expecting it, in the places where we used to find it. In a time of decline or defeat or depression, Mayday can be a reminder to search the garden of life for the shoots and buds it still produces, in whatever odd places they might be. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Socrates, when he was old and had lost his trial and was waiting in prison for his death sentence to be carried out, found himself drawn to write poetry for the first time in his life. Who would have predicted?</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Those little shoots and buds, those tiny ways that small amounts of joy still enter your life, may seem unimportant, even trivial. But they are the offer Life is making, an indication of the energy it still wants to invest. And energy can become joy and draw up new energy. Small as they seem, if you nurture them, they could grow. Any tiny spark could be the beginning of new fire.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">These tiny sprouts, these little flames, they may not bear comparison now or ever to what we’ve seen in the past. And they may look like nothing when viewed from the perspective of Eternity. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">But they are what they are. And what they are is a sign that Life is not done with us yet. That, I believe, is worth celebrating. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Happy Mayday.</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 18px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><strong>Closing</strong></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">The closing words are from Ecclesiastes, because after all that discouraging talk about vanity and chasing the wind, the author does not advise us to lay down and die. Quite the opposite:</p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; do not let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your insubstantial life. </p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Whatever your hand finds to do, do with all your might.</p>http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-holiday-of-rising-energy.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-4733553483586771782Wed, 09 Mar 2016 19:02:00 +00002016-03-09T14:06:42.899-05:00Who Owns the World? (2016 version)<p><br /><em>presented at First Church in Billerica on March 6, 2016</em></p><h4>Opening Words</h4><p>When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist. — <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9lder_C%C3%A2mara">Archbishop Hélder Câmara</a> of Brazil</p><h4>Readings</h4><p>Pope Francis is often thought of as a progressive or even radical pope, but much of his message has been to re-emphasize Catholic social justice teachings that go back more than a century, and have been restated by every pope since. Our first reading is from one of those prior encyclicals, <a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens.html"><em>Laborem Exercens</em></a>, written by John Paul II in 1981. (One progressive thing popes didn’t do in 1981 was to use gender-inclusive language. So I apologize for that in advance.)</p><blockquote><p>Working at any workbench, whether a relatively primitive or an ultramodern one, a man can easily see that through his work he enters into two inheritances: the inheritance of what is given to the whole of humanity in the resources of nature, and the inheritance of what others have already developed on the basis of those resources, primarily by developing technology, that is to say, by producing a whole collection of increasingly perfect instruments for work.</p></blockquote><p>The second reading is from Ayn Rand, a favorite author of Speaker Paul Ryan and many other conservatives. This paragraph is from her magnum opus <em>Atlas Shrugged</em>, and in particular from the John Galt speech that is the philosophical climax of the novel. Here, Galt is also talking about those “increasingly perfect instruments for work” — specifically, the steel factory owned by one of the novel’s other heroes, the industrialist Hank Rearden. </p><blockquote><p>The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics’ Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.</p></blockquote><p> I’ll hit this point harder later on, but look at what Galt has done to what the Pope called “the second inheritance”, the inheritance of technology. In Galt’s view, Hank Rearden is not just the inventor of the specific new products his factory produces, he is the sole rightful heir of all technological progress since the Middle Ages. Having been disinherited from the legacy of past inventors, the workers’ standard of living rises only through their employer’s generosity. Anything more than a medieval wage is essentially just charity. It is “a gift from Hank Rearden”.</p><p>The final reading is “The Goose and the Common”, a protest poem from 18th-century England. For centuries, the people of England had been suffering through a process known as Enclosure, in which a village’s common land would be fenced off and become the private property of the local lord. To appreciate the poem’s biting humor, you need to know this piece of 18th-century slang: a goose was not just a bird, it was also an ordinary person — a usage that survives today in phrases like “silly goose” or “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” </p><blockquote><p>The law locks up the man or woman <br />who steals the goose from off the Common,<br /> but leaves the greater villain loose ,<br />who steals the Common from off the goose.</p><p>The law says that we must atone <br />when we take what we do not own, <br />but leaves the lords and ladies fine <br />when they take what is yours and mine.<br /><br />The poor and wretched don't escape <br />when they conspire the law to break. <br />This must be so, but they endure <br />those who conspire to make the law.<br /><br />The law locks up the man or woman <br />who steals the goose from off the Common. <br />And geese will still a Common lack <br />until they go and steal it back.</p></blockquote><h4>Meditation</h4><p>The meditation is a vision of peace and prosperity that comes from the prophet Micah: “They will sit under their own grapevines and their own fig trees, and no one will make them afraid.”</p><h4>Sermon</h4><p>Unitarian Universalists talk a lot about social justice. And when we when talk among ourselves, we all more-or-less know what <em>social justice</em> means: Things should be more equal. The disadvantaged should be less disadvantaged. No one should be hungry. The sick or injured should be cared for. Education should available to everyone. And so on.</p><p>We’re much better making these kinds of lists than we are at explaining why this world we’re envisioning is just. Where is the justice in social justice?</p><p> Among ourselves, we usually don’t need to answer that question. Most people with UU values just feel it, without explanation. You say, “Isn’t it awful that in such a wealthy country, so many people are hungry or homeless or go without healthcare or education?” And whoever you are talking to probably says, “Yes, it is awful.” And the conversation goes on from there.</p><p>There’s nothing wrong with that conversation. But if that’s what we’re expecting, then we’ll be at a loss when we talk to people who have a different notion of justice. For example, <em>justice</em> could also mean that people get to keep the things they own, unless or until they decide to give them away.</p><p> If that’s what <em>justice</em> means to you, then when you hear that list of social justice goals, you’ll wonder where the money is going to come from. Who is going to pay the farmers and teachers and doctors who provide those goods and services? And more specifically, is the government going to take that money by force from the people who rightfully own it. Because, what’s just about that?</p><p>In <a href="http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1109/12/se.06.html">one of the 2012 presidential debates</a>, a young man asked the Republican candidates: “Out of every dollar that I earn, how much do you think that I deserve to keep?” Afterwards, Ron Paul had a clear and simple answer: “All of it.” </p><p>Former Judge <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/04/18/taxation-is-theft-so-why-do-americans-put-up-with-it.html">Andrew Napolitano</a>, a frequent Fox News contributor, has generated this fantasy:</p><blockquote><p>You're sitting at home at night, and there's a knock at the door. You open the door, and a guy with a gun pointed at you says: "Give me your money. I want to give it away to the less fortunate." You think he's dangerous and crazy, so you call the police. Then you find out he <em>is</em> the police, there to collect your taxes.</p></blockquote><p>Napolitano saw the income tax as representing “a terrifying presumption. It presumes that we don't really own our property.” We only own the part of it that the government chooses not to take.</p><p>No wonder <a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/marchweb-only/20-51.0.html">Glenn Beck</a> told his listeners: “Look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can.” </p><p>When people respond to your social justice talk by grabbing their wallets and running away, it’s tempting to write them off as selfish or hard-hearted. But many of them aren’t. Some people who look at the world this way are quite generous. They give money away. They volunteer. They put themselves out for other people. </p><p>But the model they put on this behavior isn’t justice, it’s charity. They do it out of the goodness of their hearts, not because they are under some obligation. And they expect the beneficiaries of their generosity to receive those gifts with humility and gratitude. Because, after all, beggars shouldn’t be choosers. </p><p>And if the amount that individuals are willing to give away doesn’t match the need — which it never does — then the charity mindset sees that not as a flaw in the system, but as a problem of personal morality. We need to do a better job of preaching generosity, not change the way our economy works.</p><p>Ultimately, if our social justice work is going to succeed, we need to do more than just talk to each other and shake our heads at people who disagree. We need to critique that charity-based worldview and explain why it’s inadequate. In short, we need to explain what’s just about social justice. </p><p>The beginning of that critique was in our opening words: It’s fine to give food to the poor, but we also need to take the next step and ask why the poor have no food. Why can’t everybody buy their own food, save for their own retirement, pay for their own health insurance, and educate their own children? And if they can’t, what does that have to do with those of us who can? Why should our property or income be entailed with some kind of obligation to provide for them?</p><p>Those are hard questions, and so right away you notice a major difference between a charity mindset and a social justice mindset: Charity comes from the heart, and often finds itself in conflict with more practical thinking. </p><p>But social justice demands that head and heart work together. It’s not enough feel sorry for the poor, we need to understand how poverty happens, and how the system that creates such a gulf between rich and poor justifies itself. If the system that your reason supports leads to a result that your compassion rejects, social justice suggests that maybe you're taking something for granted that you shouldn't. Social justice doesn’t ask you to give up on thinking and follow your heart. Instead it tells you to check your assumptions and <em>think again</em>.</p><p>Whenever I try to rethink things, my first instinct is to go back in time and read works that are a little closer to the era when the original assumptions were made. In this case there’s also a considerable irony in the author I want to tell you about, the Revolutionary War pamphleteer Thomas Paine. </p><p>You see, at about the same time that Glenn Beck started telling everybody to run away from social justice, he was also styling himself as a modern-day Thomas Paine. He named one of his books <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Glenn-Becks-Common-Sense-Control/dp/1439168571"><em>Common Sense</em></a>, and claimed to be updating Paine’s classic to call for the Tea Party revolution that we need today. Now, if you actually know something about Thomas Paine, this is perversely hilarious. Because in addition to his role in founding our country, Paine is also one of the founders of the American social justice tradition.</p><p>Thomas Paine was one of the true revolutionaries of the American Revolution. After we won our independence, he moved to England to stir up revolution there. And when the British deported him, Lafayette invited him to Paris where he tried to be the conscience of the French Revolution. That got him thrown into prison during the Reign of Terror, and only a bureaucratic mistake delayed his execution long enough for Robespierre to fall. Eventually the American ambassador, future president James Monroe, got him released. And in 1795, while he was staying with the Monroes and recovering from his ordeal, he wrote a little book called <a href="https://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html"><em>Agrarian Justice</em></a>. </p><p><em>Agrarian Justice</em> is addressed to the English, and proposes that when each young adult comes of age, the government should give him or her — I’m not being politically correct, Paine wrote gender equality into his system — a stake of capital to get a start in life. Also, those who survive to old age should get a pension. And all this should be funded by an inheritance tax on land. </p><p>Paine writes: “It is justice and not charity that is the principle of the plan.” In his mind, young adults were <em>entitled</em> to a stake in the economy, and old people were entitled to a pension. And the rationale for his inheritance tax would strike fear into the heart of Judge Napolitano: Paine believed that we <em>don’t</em> entirely own our property, and that all property comes entailed with obligations to others. </p><p>So Paine was not trying to appeal to people’s compassion and preach personal generosity. He was challenging their fundamental assumptions, and asking them to think again about one of the most basic concepts of the 18th-century economy: landed property.</p><p>When people have lived under a property system their entire lives -- as the English had then and we have today -- they tend to take it for granted. But Paine did not take the property system for granted, because he had seen the example of the Native Americans. He writes:</p><blockquote><p>The life of an Indian is a continual holiday compared with the poor of Europe; and, on the other hand, it appears to be abject when compared to the rich. … Civilization, therefore, or that which is so called, has operated in two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.</p></blockquote><p> But wait, European-style civilization is supposed to be a good thing, isn’t it? Paine agrees:</p><blockquote><p>The first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period.</p></blockquote><p>Now that’s a fine heartfelt sentiment. But if our heads are going to come along on this trip, we need to understand why things didn’t turn out that way. Was there some reason why the poor had to be wretched, or did European civilization make some early mistake that led to that result? Paine says there was a mistake, and it has to do with how we invented the concept of property. </p><p>Let me stop here for a minute, because I just snuck in a radical idea: Property is a human invention. Today, a lot of people write about property as if it were natural, something that exists prior to all societies or governments. But that’s just not true.</p><p>Paine uses theological imagery to lampoon this belief: "The Creator of the earth," he says, did not "open a land office from which the first title deeds should issue."</p><p>He might also have pointed to the animal world, because nothing remotely like property exists in nature. Animals have territory, which is a very different idea. A bird may chase rival birds away from the tree where it nests. But no bird has ever sold a tree to another bird, or rented a nest, or taken in someone else’s egg in exchange for a few worms. The tree and the nest are not property.</p><p>Similarly, land as private property is not a natural concept at all. Paine writes: </p><blockquote><p>The earth in its natural, uncultivated state, was, and ever would have continued to be THE COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life-proprietor with the rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.</p></blockquote><p>Being a practical man, Paine recognizes that modern agriculture would not work on those terms, because it requires a long investment of effort before you see any product. You have to cut down the trees and pull up the stumps and dig out the rocks. Each year you have to plow and plant and fertilize and weed. And who would do all that if, in the end, he had no more right than anyone else to gather the harvest?</p><p>So Paine believed it was right and just for the difference in value between cultivated land and uncultivated land to be private property. Not the land itself -- the <em>difference in value</em> between cultivated and uncultivated land. And here he locates the original mistake, the original sin for which the poor pay the price. Rather than just let people own the value of their improvements in the productivity of the land, we created a system in which they own <em>the land</em>. We created a system in which the Earth itself is owned, not by humanity in general, but only by the people who have their names on deeds.</p><p>Consequently, a hungry Indian could go hunt in the forest or fish in the pond that was part of his tribe’s territory, but a hungry Englishman could not, because those natural resources were owned by some other Englishman. In short, the poor of Europe were worse off than the Native Americans not because God created them that way, and not because they were lazy or stupid, but because they had been disinherited; their share of the common inheritance of humankind had been usurped. </p><p>Paine was just talking about land, but it’s easy to see how his ideas extend to other areas. No one would dig a mine or drill a well if they had no claim on the resulting iron or gold or oil, but some part of that output also has to belong to the common inheritance. It can't <em>all</em> be private property.</p><p>And consider not just our physical inheritance, but our cultural inheritance. I’m a writer. I work in words and sometimes I sell my words. But I did not invent the English language, or teach it to all of you so that you could understand me. And the ideas I’m telling you this morning: I have some claim to them, but large parts come from Thomas Paine and Pope John Paul II and other benefactors of our cultural legacy. So if there is value in my words, I didn’t create that value out of nothing. Part of that value should belong to me, but part rightfully should go back into the common inheritance.</p><p>The same is true for the Hank Reardens of this world, the inventors, researchers, and industrialists. They do indeed create value, but they don’t create it out of nothing. As Newton put it, they stand on the shoulders of giants, and the legacy of those giants should belong to everyone.</p><p>In short, I’m endorsing that idea that so scares Judge Napolitano: We don’t really own what we own, free and clear, with no obligations. And to that young man at the presidential debate, I would say: “You earned that dollar by using the common inheritance. Some part of it needs to go back.”</p><p>We all owe a debt to the common inheritance, because none of us makes things by calling them out of nothing, like the God of Genesis. Everything we make relies on the resources of the Earth and the tools that have been passed down to us. Paying our debt to the common inheritance -- and particularly to those whose share of that inheritance has been usurped -- is the “justice” in social justice.</p><p>The flaw in the charity mindset is that it refuses to recognize that debt. It accepts, without question or objection, disinheriting the poor from the common legacy. Once you have done that, they have no rightful claim on anything beyond what the rest of us volunteer to give them. And any tax collector who shows up demanding money to help the less fortunate is just a well-intentioned thief. </p><p>But if you do accept that the poor are owed a share of the common inheritance, how should they collect it? Paine, as I said, was a practical man, and he recognized that he couldn't even calculate the rents and royalties that the poor have coming, much less collect and distribute them. </p><p>Instead, he proposes that everyone be offered a deal: In payment for your share of the common inheritance, in exchange for your acceptance that you were born into a world where virtually everything of value was already claimed by someone else -- we’ll offer you this: When you reach adulthood, we’ll give you a stake, some bit of capital that can get you started in life. And if you make it to an age where you can’t reasonably expect to work any more, we’ll give you a pension. That's how he proposes to make good on the principle that civilization should benefit everyone, and not just some at the expense of others. </p><p>Notice that Paine does not propose a dole, or some program of bread and circuses, or make-work projects that will give everyone a meaningless job. His proposal is much more radical than that: <em>The poor should be capitalized.</em> Everyone should have a stake, a chance to launch themselves into the middle of the economy rather than start at the bottom.</p><p>In Paine’s day, that didn’t take much.</p><blockquote><p>When a young couple begin the world, the difference is exceedingly great whether they begin with nothing or with fifteen pounds apiece. With this aid they could buy a cow, and implements to cultivate a few acres of land; and instead of becoming burdens upon society … would be put in the way of becoming useful and profitable citizens.</p></blockquote><p>A similar idea has popped up in many other guises. In Biblical times capital meant land, which is why Micah envisioned every family under its own vines and fig trees. Later on in the encyclical I quoted, Pope John Paul II envisions the ideal society not as a Great Feeding Trough but as a Great Workbench, where we all have our place and access to the tools we need to be productive.</p><p>Launching yourself into today's information economy may be more complicated than in Paine's day, but the value of the common inheritance has grown. Exactly what deal it makes sense to offer now, in lieu of the inheritance we still can’t deliver, is a topic for another day. But certainly education must be part of it, and childhood nutrition. In general, people should be freed from poverty traps, from situations in which their short-term survival depends on doing things that harm their long-term interests. No heir of a rich inheritance should ever have to eat the seed corn.</p><p>The Pope’s image goes a long way towards helping us evaluate the adequacy of any proposal: Everyone should have a seat at the Great Workbench. That seat should belong to them by right, and not depend on anyone's approval or generosity.</p><p>Even if we had such a program, if we had a way to deliver to each and every person the value of their share of the common inheritance, things could still go wrong. A Prodigal Son might waste his inheritance. Unlucky people might lose their stakes to accident or illness. Some people's abilities might be so limited that no tools we can provide will make them productive. There would, in other words, still be occasions for charity. </p><p>But that is not where we are now. In the world we live in today, people are poor because the common inheritance has been usurped by people who believe that what is theirs is theirs, and they owe no one for its use; who believe that only land-owners are beneficiaries of the Creation; that businessmen and industrialists are the sole heirs of technological progress; that only the educated rightfully inherit our cultural legacy.</p><p>After the inheritance or some fair compensation for it has been delivered to all people, then charity might be enough. But until then, we should never stop demanding justice.</p><h4>Closing words</h4><p>The closing words are by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Bless_the_Child_%28Billie_Holiday_song%29">Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr.</a></p><blockquote><p>Rich relations may give you<br />crusts of bread and such.<br />You can help yourself,<br />but don’t take too much.<br />Cause Mama may have,<br />and Poppa may have.<br />But God bless the child that’s got his own.</p></blockquote>http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2016/03/who-owns-world-2016-version.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-2668621528490920149Fri, 11 Dec 2015 19:19:00 +00002015-12-11T14:26:49.134-05:00Humanism, as simple as I can make it<div class="post-message " data-role="message" dir="auto">Last Sunday, I got pulled into a Unitarian Universalist classroom to tell 11-year-olds about Humanism. As so often happens, attempting to simplify something for other people made it clearer for me.<br /><br />I started with the New Testament story in which Jesus boils all the commandments down to two: love God and love your neighbor.<br /><br />Just about every religion, I told the kids, has some version of that: Start by loving God, and then (because you love God) treat other people well.<br /><br />The problem is that when religions start interacting, they get so caught up in arguing about God -- does God exist? is my God the same as your God? who was God's prophet? what book describes God? who can speak for God today? -- that they often don't get around to Step 2: treating other people well. At the extreme edge, you have groups like ISIS, who treat other people horribly on the way&nbsp;(they think)&nbsp;to establishing some perfect Kingdom of God that will eventually make all that suffering worthwhile.<br /><br />Looking at that mess, Humanism says: Do it in the opposite order, and start at Step 2. Let's all focus on treating each other well, making the world better, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, giving hope to the hopeless, and so on. After we've worked together on that for a while, then some evening we'll be sitting around the fire talking about what motivates us to do this work. That would be a good time to tell me about Jesus or Muhammad or Buddha or the Tao or whatever else gets you out of bed in the morning.<br /><br />From a Humanist perspective, even the hard-core atheists who want to start by explaining why God doesn't exist are still missing the boat. Start at Step 2. We can talk about God later.</div>http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2015/12/humanism-as-simple-as-i-can-make-it.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-2813462459605524794Tue, 03 Nov 2015 13:55:00 +00002015-11-03T08:55:35.215-05:00Hope, True and FalseI keep forgetting to post the link to the text and audio of the talk I gave at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, IL in September. It's called "<a href="http://uuquincy.org/talks/20150927.shtml" target="_blank">Hope, True and False</a>", and it's my answer to a question I get asked all the time: "How do you follow the news so closely without getting depressed?"http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2015/11/i-keep-forgetting-to-post-link-to-text.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-4961915383728902127Tue, 03 Nov 2015 13:32:00 +00002015-11-03T08:38:54.788-05:00Searching for a UU Identity<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 20px; line-height: normal; margin: 3px 0px 6px; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">a service presented by Doug Muder at First Parish Church of Billerica, Massachusetts on November 1, 2015</span></div><div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 12px 0px 6px;"><b><i>Opening Words</i></b></div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;">In the early days of Unitarian Christianity, William Ellery Channing wrote:&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 16px;"><br /></div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 14.2px 28.4px;">It has been the fault of all sects that they have been too anxious to define their religion. They have labored to circumscribe the infinite.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 14.2px 28.4px;">Christianity, as it exists in the mind of the true disciple, is not made up of fragments, of separate ideas which he can express in detached propositions. It is a vast and ever-unfolding whole, pervaded by one spirit, each precept and doctrine deriving its vitality from its union with all.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 14.2px 28.4px;">When I see this generous, heavenly doctrine compressed and cramped in human creeds, I feel as I should were I to see screws and chains applied to the countenance and limbs of a noble fellow-creature, deforming and destroying one of the most beautiful works of God.</div><div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: normal; margin: 12px 0px 6px;"><b><i>Readings</i></b></div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 6px;"><b>The Apostle's Creed.&nbsp;</b></div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">A few minutes ago in the Affirmation of Faith, we made a covenant, a commitment to each other that we are going to be together in a certain way: in peace, in freedom, and in fellowship.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">In the Lutheran church where I grew up, and probably in the churches where some of you grew up, that spot in the service was filled by a creed, a statement of the common beliefs that defined the community.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">As I read the creed that I grew up reciting, I want you to imagine two things: First, how alienating it would be if you realized that you didn't believe some of the things that your entire community was pledging that it believes. And second, if you did believe the creed, what a sense of belonging and common purpose you would feel to be surrounded by people publicly announcing that they agree with you.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Our creed went like this:</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 14.2px 28.4px;">I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 14.2px 28.4px;">I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 14.2px 28.4px;">I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy Christian Church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 6px;"><b>The UU Principles</b>&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">By contrast, Unitarian Universalists have rejected creeds ever since Channing. In particular, the UU Principles are not a creed. They were never intended to be a creed and, for reasons I'll discuss later, <br /> they wouldn't work particularly well as a creed. While they describe some widely shared UU beliefs and values they don't define our faith. So we don't throw people out if they don't agree with all the UU Principles.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">But we do use the Principles in one way that resembles how my childhood church used its creed. Namely, if you find yourself in a discussion of what Unitarian Universalists believe, sooner or later someone is going to pull out the Principles. This is what they say:</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 14.2px 28.4px;">We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity, and compassion in human relations; acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations; a free and responsible search for truth and meaning; the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large; the goal of world community <br /> with peace, liberty, and justice for all; respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.</div><div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: normal; margin: 12px 0px 6px;"><b><i>Sermon</i></b></div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">In 1822, a Dr. Cooper from Pennsylvania wrote to ex-President Thomas Jefferson, complaining about religious fanaticism in his state. In his reply, Jefferson pointed hopefully to Massachusetts, where “Unitarianism has advanced to so great strength, as now to humble [the] haughtiest of ... religious sects.”</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Jefferson prophesied the ultimate defeat of religious fanaticism by more reasonable modes of thought. “The diffusion of instruction, to which there is now so growing an attention, will be the remote remedy to this fever of fanaticism; while the more proximate one will be the progress of Unitarianism. That this will, ere long, be the religion of the majority from north to south, I have no doubt.”</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Well, it didn't quite work out that way, did it?</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Again around the beginning of the 20th century, Unitarians were optimistic, because everywhere they looked, the myths of religion were being replaced by the evidence-based theories of science. Darwin had explained the origins of humanity. Before that, Pasteur gave us the germ theory of disease, Franklin explained lightning, and Copernicus and Kepler the motions of the planets.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">And in this dawning 20th century, scientists were doing or about to do things that religion could only tell stories about: fly through the air, stop epidemics, and communicate instantaneously across oceans. If you were a young person who longed to do miracles, then you belonged in a laboratory, not in a pulpit or a monastery.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Surely, in this bright and promising new century, the old-time religion would fade away, beaten at long last by what Jefferson had called “the diffusion of instruction”. Soon everyone would be educated, and they would have no need for ancient tales about six-day creation or the virgin birth or Jesus ascending above the clouds, where, after all, there is only the dark vacuum of outer space.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">And who would pick up the pieces after the inevitable collapse of myth and superstition? Why, we would: the Unitarians, the Universalists, and the other liberal faiths that were welcoming science rather than resisting it. We would sift through the wreckage of the old religion and preserve those nuggets that were worth saving, like the Golden Rule or the Sermon on the Mount. The rest would blow away like dust, and a more enlightened civilization would rise above its ruins.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">But History was actually headed in a different direction.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">In 1910, conservative Christian theologians started publishing a series of books called <i>The Fundamentals. </i>And that was the beginning of a new movement called <i>fundamentalism</i>. Today's fundamentalists like to think of their movement as the old religion – Jerry Falwell called his TV program <i>The Old-Time Gospel Hour</i> – but in fact it was yet another new development of the 20th century. Fundamentalism is slightly younger than the airplane.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">The real old-time preachers and prophets had been innocent of science. They explained the world through myth because that was what they had. But fundamentalism wasn't innocent or ignorant, it was defiant. That was new. Fundamentalists knew that there were scientific explanations, but they didn't care. They would not listen, and they would not change.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">And they succeeded. All over the world, in Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and many other faiths, wherever modern society threatened a traditional way of life, a fundamentalist movement developed. In religion, that – and not the triumph of rational liberalism – was the big story of the 20th century.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">So why am I telling you this? What does it have to do with my topic of Unitarian Universalist identity? I started there because I think it's important for us to understand why fundamentalism succeeded when so many voices in our movement were predicting the exact opposite.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">The answer is fairly simple, and it leaves us a lot to think about.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">You see, religion has always been about more than just who made the world or why there are seasons or even how to get to Heaven. Religion is also about identity, about who I am and who my people are and why it's important that we live the way we do. As change accelerates, those questions become harder and harder for individuals to answer on their own. So they come to church.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Think back to village life in pre-modern times. In those days, being your parents' child might be all the identity you needed. A man quite likely would grow the same crops on the same land as his father and grandfather,&nbsp; or perhaps practice the same profession in the same shop. A woman would marry and raise children, sew clothing from the same patterns her mother and grandmother had used, and feed her family the same foods prepared in the same ways. The question “Who are you?”<b> </b>didn't require deep introspection; it was a public fact. In the village, everybody knew who you were.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Today, though, you might live in half a dozen cities in the course of your lifetime, with a different set of friends and co-workers in each one. They can't tell you who you are, because they won't know until <i>you</i> tell <i>them</i>.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">And what will you say? There is almost nothing about you that can be counted on to stay the same from the beginning of your life to the end. In your lifetime, you might practice three or four completely different professions. You might have more than one marriage, each with its own children. Your identification as gay or straight might shift from one decade to the next. You might even change your gender. Everything about you is potentially fluid; nothing is solid.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">So who are you? Why does it matter that you are alive now, doing … whatever it is you do? Today, those are the kinds of questions that bring people to religion.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Fundamentalism succeeded because it has compelling answers to those questions. When you join that movement, you become one of the people who are preserving God's true revelation. You are a warrior in the cosmic battle of Good against Evil. <i>That</i> is a story that will get you out of bed in the morning. In uncertain times, it will tell you what you ought to be doing with your life, and build a strong bond with all those who share that mission.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">As I was reading the Apostles' Creed, many of you were probably picking apart all the places where it is unreasonable, unsupported by evidence, or in defiance of common sense. But perversely, that's why it works so well to bond people together. The more outlandish a statement sounds, the more rejection it provokes from outsiders, the better it establishes the common identity of the people who say it.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Think about it: If you sit next to a stranger on an airplane, and during the flight you agree that water is wet and chocolate is tasty and the airline should make these seats bigger, then you don't necessarily develop a sense that you have much in common. But if it turns out that you both believe the same bizarre conspiracy theory about the Kennedy assassination or 9-11 or the secret cabal that rules the world, then by the time you step off that plane you're practically family.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">An outrageous creed is like a military haircut. It makes a statement that binds people together. If the boot-camp buzz cut were stylish, if everyone were imitating it, then it wouldn't mean anything. It wouldn't tell the other recruits: “I am one of you. I value being one of you so much that I am willing to look like this.”</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">By contrast, we UUs often struggle with our religious identities. Because we are all about freedom and the individual conscience we've never had a creed. And trying to write one now would violate something deep in our covenant with each other. Who would dare claim the authority to tell other UUs what they have to believe? It's unthinkable.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">And because we don't insist that you believe unlikely things or submit to institutional authority, we have the reputation of being an easy, undemanding religion. Do you disagree with what you hear from the pulpit? Fine. Don't want to come every Sunday? Don't. You don't have to embarrass yourself by trying to convert your friends and co-workers. There are no onerous rules about what you can eat, or who you can love, or what you have to wear. You don't have to tithe, or give anything at all unless you want to. Make up your own mind about that. You are a free individual.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">And yet, in this era when it is so hard to know who you are, the religions that grow are the difficult ones. Easy religions just don't create that sense of common challenge and shared hardship that builds a group identity. All that UU freedom and individuality often leaves us at a loss to explain what we stand for, what we have in common, or why we are here together at all.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">In my congregation over in Bedford, in our Coming of Age program, one of the exercises we assign our teen-agers is to write what is called an “elevator speech”. The premise is that you are on an elevator when someone asks you what Unitarian Universalism is about. You have less than a minute before one of you gets off. What can you say?</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Back in 1970, if my Lutheran confirmation class had been given a similar assignment, it would have been simple. I could have just said: “Because Jesus died for our sins, we can go to heaven.” Even in a short building with a quick elevator, that would have left plenty of time to move on to discuss the weather or the Patriots.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">But a UU elevator speech is very challenging, and I am always a little ashamed to admit that I've never come up with one I really like. I wrote a column for <i>UU World </i>about that once. It's called “Stop the Elevator, I'm Not Done”.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Another project we assign the kids – which also appears in some adult-ed classes –&nbsp; is to write a credo, a personal creed, a statement of your own beliefs, whatever they might be.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">A credo a marvelous exercise in introspection, and the service in May when the teens read their credos to the congregation is one of the most inspiring things we do. Not because they necessarily come up with such wonderful answers to life's big questions – some are always more thoughtful than others – but because the act of standing in the pulpit and telling us their ideas marks a commitment to begin a lifetime of thinking for themselves.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">And yet sometimes I wonder how much good it does to have a creed that no one will say with you, and that you yourself may change at any time. How does that give you a sense of identity as a Unitarian Universalist?</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Now, some UUs might say that we don't need that. We're a loose association of individuals who enjoy each other's company, and maybe that's enough.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">But I have to say that for myself, it isn't enough, and I doubt that I'm the only one. I suspect a lot of Unitarian Universalists long to feel that we are part of something larger than ourselves, part of something that is big enough to go “forward through the ages” and grand enough to be worth singing about.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">So today I want to suggest a third kind of statement UUs might work on. Not an elevator speech to describe Unitarian Universalism in general,or a credo that states your personal beliefs, but something that brings the two together in a statement of your own identity as a Unitarian Universalist.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">I'm still working on the best way to phrase the question I have in mind, but it might go something like this: How does what I am trying to do with my life relate to what Unitarian Universalists are doing together? Or, more concisely: What am <i>I</i> doing <i>here</i>?</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Rather than just read you a personal statement that might apply only to me, I thought it might be more usefulto walk you through some of my thought process as I tried to answer that question.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Now the individual side of the question is already fairly difficult, because it requires at least some notion of what you <i>are </i>trying to do with your life, or what you <i>want</i> to be doing. As I wrestled with that, I noticed two important shifts: First, unlike the elevator speech or the credo, this question is about doing, not believing. Deeds, not creeds.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">And second, I found my focus shifting away from freedom and towards commitment. If the question is what I want to do with my life, then yes, I need to be free. But that's a prerequisite, not a goal. If I'm not free to look at the world with my own eyes and draw my own conclusions and choose my own actions, then someone else is deciding what I'll do with my life, and what I want doesn't really matter.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">But the point of that freedom is not so that I can live whimsically from one day to the next, doing whatever comes into my head. To me, the point of being free is that if a goal bubbles up inside me, I have the power to commit myself to it. My best days, the ones that I look back at with a sense of “Yes! That's the person I want to be.” are not my idle or whimsical days, they're the ones in which I have felt driven to pursue a vision that comes from deep inside.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">We don't talk a lot about <i>vision</i> in our churches. Visions tend to be those things that aren't there that crazy people see. But vision is also how freedom turns into commitment. When you have seen something beautiful in your mind and had the thought, “Yes, this can happen. I can do this.” then nobody has to push you or goad you or make you feel guilty. When you are possessed by a beautiful vision, you don't resign yourself to tasks and say, “Oh, I suppose I ought to be doing that.” It's more like, “Look! It's right over there! Come on!”</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">That's the personal side of the identity-statement process, the what-do-I-want-to-do-with-my-life side, but what about the community side? In other words, what kinds of visions can I hope to have in a Unitarian Universalist congregation? What visions can I hope that other UUs will share and get excited about?</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">And that brought me back to the UU Principles. When I started asking those questions, suddenly the Principles began to sound very different to me.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">If you think of the Principles as beliefs, then they quickly become nice ideas that it feels good to nod your head to. That's why they make such a terrible creed; reciting them is too easy. Run the Principles past somebody who would never in a million years become a UU, and they're likely to say “Yeah, sure, why not? Justice, equity, and compassion in human relations? I mean, I'm not for injustice, unfairness, and hard-heartedness. So sure, why not?”</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">But if you think of the Principles as visions, as things that we are trying to see now in our minds so that we can bring them into reality in the future, that becomes a lot more challenging. For example, it's easy to nod your head to the idea that every person has worth and dignity. But when you're alone on the T, and somebody gets on who is so different from you that you find them scary or disgusting, do you <i>see</i> that person's worth and dignity? Is it present to you, like a physical reality?</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Developing that kind of vision is not just a nice idea, it's a challenging spiritual practice.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">That's the whole point of Black Lives Matter. Of course you <i>believe</i> as an abstract principle that lives matter. But can you look specifically at African Americans, who have been demonized and stereotyped for centuries, and <i>see</i> their value?</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Similarly, it's easy to nod your head when someone says that everything is connected. But the interdependent web of all existence – is it <i>real</i> to you? When Boko Haram wipes out an entire village in Nigeria, or when refugees stream out of Syria with nothing but the clothes on their backs, do you <i>feel</i> that vibrating down the web until it shakes something inside you?</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">When you're trying to envision rather than just believe, suddenly this isn't such an easy religion any more.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Justice in our relationships – of course we <i>believe</i> in that. Who doesn't?&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">But what about all those relationships we don't usually think about? What about your relationship with the people – probably poor people living somewhere like Bangladesh or Indonesia – who made the clothes you're wearing, or the phone that's in your pocket? What about your relationship with people all over the world whose lives are affected by the government that represents you? Can you bring those relationships into your mind at all? Can you envision a world where those relationships are all just and equitable and compassionate? How would that world come to be?</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">So for me, the community side of the question, the part about what Unitarian Universalists are trying to do together, boils down to this: We're not just trying to <i>believe</i> in these seven principles, we're trying to make them real, first to ourselves, so that we actually <i>see</i> them rather than just nod our heads when we hear the words – and then, having seen in our minds a world where the principles have become reality, we are committed, maybe even driven, to push the real world in that direction.</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">Is there anything in that project that echoes what you personally want to do with your life? Does any of that reverberate in your soul and make you say “Yes, that's what I want my life to be about.”?&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">It may not. It doesn't have to. You are free. Free to see the world through your own eyes and draw your own conclusions and set your own goals.&nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px 0px 7px;">But if some part of that vision and that mission does overlap with what you want your life to be about, then I believe that a Unitarian Universalist congregation is a good place to work on it, and Unitarian Universalists are good allies to have. If that is true for you, as it is for me, then I believe this is a place you can belong, and Unitarian Universalists can be your people.</div>http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2015/11/searching-for-uu-identity.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-3403452737243273032Wed, 06 May 2015 18:39:00 +00002015-05-06T14:44:17.462-04:00Universalism, Politics, and Evil<p style="margin-bottom: 0.25in;" lang="en-BZ"><img style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="" src="https://scontent-lga.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfa1/v/t1.0-9/p526x296/11142425_894607660599613_5314086937220192963_n.jpg?oh=77f1969c0fdef51ac2b88d37565d7017&amp;oe=55D01EB2" alt="" width="" height="" border="0" /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.25in; text-align: center;" lang="en-BZ"><em>May 3, 2015 at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois.</em></p><p><strong>Opening Words</strong>: "Outwitted" by Edwin Markham</p><p><strong>Introduction to the Reading: </strong>Historically, Unitarian Universalism gets the “Universalist” part of its name from the Christian doctrine of universal salvation, the belief that Jesus’ sacrifice paid the freight for everyone, so sooner or later — no matter what they believe or how evil they are — everyone is going to wind up in Heaven. There couldn't possibly be a Hell, because God is too good to create one, and God loves each human soul too much to give up on it and cast it away forever. </p><p>As you might imagine, the Catholic Church considered universal salvation a heresy. They started stamping it out in the third century, but no matter how many books or heretics they burnedit kept popping up every few generations, until in colonial America it became the Universalist Church.</p><p>What made universal salvation so hard to suppress was that unpredictable people at unpredictable times kept having the same religious experience: a vision of the goodness of God and the unconditionality of God’s love. </p><p>Christians are still having that vision, whether they’ve ever been exposed to Unitarian Universalism or not. Occasionally they have it at very inconvenient times. In 2005, the radio program This American Life devoted an episode to the extremely inconvenient universalist awakening of Carlton Pearson.</p><p>Carlton was a rising black televangelist, a protege of Oral Roberts. He had appeared in the pulpit with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. His Higher Dimensions megachurch in Tulsa was drawing 5,000 people a week. And then this happened:</p><p><strong>Reading:</strong> From <em>This American Life </em>(<a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/304/heretics">December 16, 2005</a>)</p><p>Well, my little girl, who will be nine next month, was an infant. I was watching the evening news. The Hutus and Tutus were returning from Rwanda to Uganda, and Peter Jennings was doing a piece on it. </p><p>Now, Majeste was in my lap, my little girl. I'm eating the meal, and I'm watching these little kids with swollen bellies. And it looks like their skin is stretched across their little skeletal remains. Their hair is kind of red from malnutrition. The babies, they've got flies in the corners of their eyes and of their mouths. And they reach for their mother's breast, and the mother's breast looks like a little pencil hanging there. I mean, the baby's reaching for the breast, there's no milk.</p><p>And I, with my little fat-faced baby, and a plate of food and a big-screen television. And I said, "God, I don't know how you can call yourself a loving, sovereign God and allow these people to suffer this way and just suck them right into Hell," which is what was my assumption. </p><p>And I heard a voice say within me, "So that's what you think we're doing?" </p><p>And I remember I didn't say yes or no. I said, "That's what I've been taught." </p><p>"We're sucking them into Hell?" I said,</p><p>"Yes." "And what would change that?" </p><p>"Well, they need to get saved." </p><p>"And how would that happen?" </p><p>"Well, somebody needs to preach the Gospel to them and get them saved." </p><p>"So if you think the only way they're going to get saved is for somebody to preach the Gospel to them and that we're sucking them into Hell, why don't you put your little baby down, turn your big-screen television off, push your plate away, get on the first thing smoking, and go get them saved?"</p><p>And I remember I broke into tears. I was very upset. I remember thinking, "God, don't put that guilt on me. You know I've given you the best 40 years of my life. Besides, I can't save the whole world. I'm doing the best I can. I can't save this whole world." </p><p>And that's where I remember, and I believe it was God, saying, "Precisely. You can't save this world. That's what <em>we</em> did. Do you think we're sucking them into Hell? Can't you see they're already there? That's Hell. You keep creating and inventing that for yourselves. I'm taking them into My presence."</p><p>And I thought, well, I'll be. That's weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. That's where the pain comes from. We do that to each other, and we do it to ourselves. Then I saw emergency rooms. I saw divorce court. I saw jails and prisons. I saw how we create Hell on this planet for each other. And for the first time in my life, I did not see God as the inventor of Hell.</p><p><strong>Talk: </strong>If you read my <a href="http://weeklysift.com/">Weekly Sift</a> blog, you probably know that I reliably take the positions that are known as “politically correct”: I support marriage equality, I think black lives matter, I believe women when they talk about rape, I defend Muslims, I wish the rich paid more taxes, I advocate negotiating with unpopular countries like Iran and Cuba, I think voting should be easy, I believe in unions and a higher minimum wage, I think poor people usually work harder than rich people, I want everyone to have access to health care, and the idea that a few cheaters might be abusing food stamps doesn’t bother me nearly so much as the possibility that there still might be some hungry people out there. </p><p>Down the line, politically correct.</p><p>Now, describing those positions that way is disparaging, because it implies that they are just a fashion. These are the chic ideas among the liberal tribe these days, and we display them so that we will recognize each other.</p><p>And it works. If I meet a stranger and she says, “It’s a shame Elizabeth Warren won’t challenge Hillary” I think: “Ah, one of my people.”</p><p>Because human beings are like that. We’re tribal. It’s evolution — another one of those fashionable liberal ideas. One explanation for why the brains of primates got bigger was that we needed to do a lot of social processing to hold together larger groups. Larger groups have a survival advantage, so evolution favors larger brains. </p><p>If you compare humans to other primates, our brain size says we should run in tribes of about 150, compared to under 100 for chimpanzees and bonobos. That’s called “Dunbar’s number” and even today, it shows up in the literature about church size. In congregations with less than 150 members, everybody can have a personal relationship with everybody else. But 150 members is often a crisis point, and requires some kind of reorganization. It’s biology.</p><p>Now, one way our ancestors got around those limitations and held together tribes larger than 150 was to invent fashion. We learned to identify with each other's external trappings even if we didn't have a personal relationship. So we’d paint our bodies red or put bones through our noses, and that way if we met someone we didn't recognize, we could tell whether or not he belonged to our tribe. And if the next tribe started to copy us, then we’d have to change to a different color or a different kind of bone. Because that's how fashion works. It’s how like-minded people recognize each other.</p><p>Naturally, it’s easier for me to spot political fashionability in people I disagree with. For example, I’ll bet most of you know some smart, scientifically literate conservative who for some reason is blind to the evidence for global warming. You can be having a perfectly intelligent conversation, but something strange happens when climate change come up. He just can’t go there.</p><p>It’s tribal. Ten or fifteen years ago, a John McCain or a Newt Gingrich could acknowledge global warming. But fashion shifted, and climate change became a global socialist conspiracy. Today, a conservative who admits to believing in it risks being ostracized from his political community.</p><p>Of course, liberals and conservatives aren’t perfect mirror images of each other, so just because the other side has some fault doesn’t mean my side necessarily has it too. But in this case I think it’s fair to say that sometimes we do. Because tribalism and fashionability aren’t flaws in the conservative worldview, they’re part of basic humanity. We are all tempted to bend over backwards to fit in with the people we recognize as our own.</p><p>But just because an opinion or a practice is fashionable doesn’t mean it’s <em>just</em> fashionable. There also might be some good reason for it. For example, children are still reciting “Eeny Meeny Miney Moe”, but they say it differently than I did. Today they say, “Catch a tiger by the toe.” But if you’re my age or a little older, maybe you remember saying, “Catch a nigger by the toe.” We didn’t necessarily think about what we were saying, that’s just how the rhyme went in those days.</p><p>That version is out of fashion now, but it’s not just fashion that keeps us from teaching it to our children. There’s a reason to say it the new way, and I don’t think the old rhyme is ever going to come back.</p><p>So yes, I understand that all the opinions I listed at the beginning of this talk are fashionable among liberals, but that doesn’t mean that nothing more than fashion links them all together. </p><p>Conservatives usually will grant me that. My views aren’t just liberal chic, they come from a higher principle. Like: I hate America. Or I want to destroy western civilization. Or maybe I just hate myself, so I push against whites and men and Americans and anybody else who resembles me. </p><p>Those certainly are unifying principles. But they’re not the one I had in mind. To me, all those positions on all those diverse issues arise from the spirit of Universalism as I understand it. Which is not to say that Universalism has a political dogma, or that you can’t be a good Unitarian Universalist if you disagree. But this is where Universalism takes me.</p><p>When I introduced the reading I talked about the origins of Universalism in the doctrine of universal salvation. When you describe it that way, Universalism seems very etherial and other-worldly. It’s all about God and the afterlife, and doesn’t seem to have much to do with food stamps or foreign policy. But those theological ideas laid the groundwork for a radical kind of Humanism that we're still practicing today.</p><p>You see, in orthodox Christianity, as in many other faiths, the afterlife isn't one place, it's two places: a blissful Heaven and a torturous Hell. And that creates a fundamental division in humanity between the Saved, who will be on the boat to Heaven, and the Damned, who will be on the boat to Hell. Orthodox believers see this not as some unfortunate accident, but as divine justice. The Damned are bound for eternal torment because that is what they deserve.</p><p>That vision of the afterlife doesn’t force believers to take a harsh view of life here and now — many people who believe in Hell are kind and generous here on Earth. But if you have any harshness already in you, this vision of the Saved and the Damned will magnify it. Because it does lend itself to the harsh view that once you step off the path of righteousness, you deserve whatever you get. </p><p>So if a young woman gets raped, well, what did she think would happen when she went to that party dressed like that? If a gay man gets AIDS, if a petty criminal gets killed by police, if a Muslim villager becomes collateral damage in a drone strike, why do they deserve our compassion? They stepped off the path laid out in a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, and they got what was coming to them.</p><p>If you’re not careful, the Saved and the Damned can come to seem like two different species. In the New Testament, Jesus uses Judgment Day metaphors that seem to say that. He talks about God separating the sheep from the goats, or about the harvest, when the grain is kept but the weeds are burned. </p><p>John Calvin went a step further. Not only would humanity be divided at the end of time, but it had been two species all along. From the moment of Creation, God had predestined some souls for Heaven and others for Hell. That was the kind of Christianity that many of the early American Universalists grew up with.</p><p>Human beings, as I was saying before, have a tendency towards tribalism. And if you’re not careful, this theology of the Saved and the Damned can ally itself with your tribal impulses. And then the Saved become the Good People, the people like us, and the Damned are the Bad People, the people like them. It becomes easier to look at someone who is different, and see not a fellow human being, a child of the same God, possessed of the same rights and faculties I have, but rather someone whose ticket to Hell is already punched and only the formality of death is delaying the completion of his damnation.</p><p>That is certainly how colonial Americans behaved sometimes. These heathen Indians — why shouldn’t they be driven off this land where I want to build my City on a Hill for the greater glory of God? These pagan Africans — why shouldn’t they be my slaves? And if I convert either of them to Christianity, well then they should thank me. I get their land and their labor, but they get eternal salvation, so it works out for everyone. </p><p>Universalism said no to all this. There aren’t two afterlives or two boats to the afterlife, no Saved and Damned. There are just people. Humanity is one species, and we are all in the same boat. We all have the same basic set of emotions, the same drives, the same temptations, and the same yearnings for a better life. </p><p>From the very beginning, that had political implications. When American Universalists began to think of themselves as a national movement, one of the first things they did was to call for the abolition of slavery. (They were the second denomination to do that, after the Quakers.) And perhaps the beginning of American feminism was the essay “On the Equality of the Sexes”, written in 1779 by Judith Sargent Murray, the wife of Universalist leader John Murray.</p><p>The political upshot of Universalism — which continues in Unitarian Universalism today, even among those of us who don't believe in God or the afterlife any more — is that since God isn’t writing anybody off, we don’t get to either. We are obligated to try to imagine the full humanity of everyone, to picture them not as damned or evil or inconsequential, but as people deserving of the same kind of consideration we would like to claim for ourselves.</p><p>That’s an easy thing to say, and easy to nod to when somebody else says it. But in actual practice, it is difficult and radical. Not many people manage it consistently, and I know I find it a struggle. </p><p>When people live far away from us, or live so differently from us that we are afraid of them, or if they act in ways we find inconvenient, or if they are unpopular and lack the power to make us respect their point of view, it’s easy to slip into imagining them in stereotyped ways rather than seeing them as human beings as deep and as complicated as we are.</p><p>When this country first started debating marriage equality, I’d often hear someone say, “I can’t understand why two men would even <em>want</em> to get married.” Of course the people who said this were often married themselves and knew exactly why they had done it: They wanted to share a life with someone, to tell the world that this relationship was special, to build a secure household for raising children. Why a same-sex couple might want to marry was a mystery only to straights who could not let themselves imagine that gays and lesbians could be so much like them.</p><p>When protest — and sometimes violence — was erupting in Ferguson, and again last weekend in Baltimore, I heard the most amazing explanations of why people were out in the streets: Looting and burning weren’t isolated responses to mistreatment, they were the whole point. Michael Brown or Freddie Gray were just excuses to throw off the constraints of law and civilization. </p><p>Again and again, I heard TV pundits talk about our fellow citizens as if they were animals to be tamed or vermin to be controlled. So few called on us to imagine our own neighborhoods being similarly tamed and controlled, or to ask ourselves how we would respond to such treatment.</p><p>Even when the poor are quiet, I hear astounding things about them. They are “lucky duckies” because they don’t have to work or pay taxes. They have no pride or ambition, and they don’t want their children to work hard and get an education and succeed. Somehow, that description is easier to believe than that the poor want the same things from life we do, but just have a harder time getting them.</p><p>Foreign countries are also split into the Good People and the Bad People. The Good Foreigners accept the place in the world order that the United States has assigned them, and the Bad Foreigners don’t.</p><p>And the reason they don’t is not because they love their land and their people the way we love ours. It’s not because they want their country to find its own place in the world or to shape its own system of government like we did. It’s not even because they fear and distrust us the same way we fear and distrust them. </p><p>No, they oppose us because they are all madmen and monsters. They hate freedom. They are enemies of all human civilization. There is no understanding them or talking to them; all we can hope to do is go to war and kill them.</p><p>Universalism says no to all that.</p><p>It says that if you want to understand other people, the place to start is with our shared humanity and all that it implies. People living very different lives from us may have been shaped by different experiences, but underneath all that nearly all of them have the same needs, the same drives, the same fears, and the same hopes that we do. They aren’t a species of Bad People pledged to the Devil with a reservation on the boat to Hell. They have the same ticket to life and death that we all do.</p><p>Now I can’t just stop there without responding to the most common objection to Universalism: Universalism, people will tell you, is a rose-tinted worldview. Everybody is nice. Everybody is trustworthy. Everybody is like us. If you believe that, the critics say, you’ll be a sucker. Because bad people exist, evil exists, and you won’t be able to deal with that evil, because you have made yourself blind to it.</p><p>There is a difficulty there, a challenge. But it’s not the one the critics claim. If you approach the world as a Universalist, if you envision all people as human in the same way that you are human, then you <em>won’t</em> be able to deal with evil — <em>if</em> you imagine that there is no evil in you.</p><p>But if you give in to the tribal temptation to say “We are the Good People”, if you give in to the egotistic temptation to say “I am Good”, then you need to believe in the Bad People. Because how else could the world be this way? We didn’t do it. </p><p>Earlier in the talk I criticized a couple of things Jesus said. Now I’d like to give him credit for an observation I find insightful: “Whosoever hates his brother is a murderer.” </p><p>A lot of people interpret that in a way that doesn’t do Jesus much credit. They think he’s holding us responsible for the bad thoughts we don’t act on. But I think he’s saying that you’re kidding yourself if you imagine that some great moral divide separates you from the Bad People. </p><p>Have you ever hated someone? Then you know where murder comes from. Have you been afraid and humiliated? Then you know why people lash out. Have you ever wanted to slough off inconvenient responsibilities? To forget a promise? To look at someone else’s suffering and say, “I don’t have anything to do with that” when deep down you know you really do? Then you know why people cheat and betray each other’s trust. Don’t act like evil is some great mystery; it isn’t. We all live with it all the time.</p><p>Universalism doesn’t deny the existence of evil, or the struggle between good and evil. It just refuses to frame that struggle as an external battle between Good People like us and Bad People like them. It doesn’t see the battle between good and evil as something that’s happening far away in Syria or the Ukraine, or in Washington, or in the poor neighborhoods of St. Louis or Baltimore. </p><p>Good and evil are both part of our human inheritance, and not even an Almighty God can divide them so neatly as to send the Good to Heaven and the Evil to Hell. The battle between good and evil is always happening, right here right now, inside each and every one of us. We win some and we lose some. All of us.</p><p>I want to close back where I started, with political correctness and the liberal tribe. One consequence of recognizing that humanity is one species and we’re all in the same boat is that we have to own up to feeling the same tribal temptations that we see in our opponents. Universalism can warn us against that human tendency, but it can’t completely inoculate us. </p><p>And so every day on my Twitter and Facebook feeds, I see link after link about the horrible things the other side is saying or doing;links that are there mainly to raise my anger, and to reinforce the idea that I and my friends are the Good People fighting the Bad People. And the Bad People do not have their own, perhaps misguided, view of right and good. They are monsters and maniacs, committed to falsehood and impervious to reason or compassion. So if my side doesn't do whatever it takes to win, the world will plunge into eternal darkness.</p><p>That’s not a Universalist style of rhetoric.</p><p>I face that issue every week when I put the Sift together. Whatever outrageous thing Michele Bachmann or Louie Gohmert said this week, am I tempted to include it because my readers need to know the full range of the ideas that are out there? Or am I just trying to raise their blood pressure and build their sense of our common righteousness?</p><p>I can't ignore that question. Because there is a weakness in the Universalist position, one that the other side doesn’t share: We can lose by winning. If we win by demonizing and stereotyping, if we win by casting ourselves as the Saved and our opponents as the Damned — then we’ve lost. If good vs. evil is a battle inside each person, then evil can win <em>in us</em> at the very moment that we are winning in the external world. </p><p>Polarization is a fact of today’s political landscape, and we have to deal with it. But we can’t afford to lose ourselves in polarization. Because our virtues are not divine, they’re human. And their vices are not demonic, they’re human. </p><p>Good and evil are both part of the human inheritance that everyone shares. And whenever we forget that, no matter what is happening on the battlefield out there, we’re losing.</p><p><strong>Closing words: </strong>“Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost</p>http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2015/05/universalism-politics-and-evil.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-7786230209283850853Tue, 28 Apr 2015 11:53:00 +00002015-04-28T07:53:08.910-04:00DomeOut there, the old man says, <br />brushing the morning condensation off the inside of the glass, <br />the desert swallows whole rivers.<br />I’ve seen it. Long ago. Before. <br /><br />A river came down from the Mountain, <br />roaring like the Source of Life itself.<br />And I thought, if I followed, it might lead me<br />to a port on some great salt sea,<br />like the ones in all the stories.<br /><br />But it didn’t.<br />The sun, the wind, <br />and the simple incongruities of scale had their way.<br />Until in the end, it was just a damp place in the sand,<br />and then nothing.<br /><br />I would like to have seen that, I say.<br />But really I mean<br />I wish I could hear it.<br />What would water have to do to roar<br />rather than burble or trickle or drip? <br /><br />It’s better this way, he says.<br />We had to seal up.<br />Before the Dome, our little spring<br />didn’t amount to much on the desert's scale.<br />Barely a puddle most of the year.<br />If you timed your migration wrong you might miss it.<br />But now …<br />He waved his arm to take in the gardens and the trees<br />and the our healthy little village.<br />… now there’s a little paradise in here.<br /><br />Do you think Paradise is really like this? I ask.<br />With a spring and gardens and a dome?<br /><br />What else could it be?<br />It’s a place of goodness,<br />and what good survives without protection?<br />Without a dome over Heaven, <br />Hell would leech all its life out<br />until God Himself was just a damp place in the sand.<br /><br />The Ancients, I say, for I like to study such things,<br />the Ancients pictured God much bigger than that.<br />Bigger than the desert, bigger than the whole world.<br /><br />The Ancients, he says, and spits on the black dirt beneath our feet,<br />the thin topsoil it took decades to coax and conjure into existence.<br />They made that desert, in their infinite fucking wisdom.<br />If they’ve got a cock in this fight<br />I’ll bet on the other one.<br />We had to seal it up.<br /><br />Occasionally, I recall as I look towards the horizon, <br />we still see travelers out there.<br />They come towards us as if we were a mirage,<br />as if there were still an open oasis here.<br />I saw one close up once.<br />He was pounding on the glass<br />like it was a door I could open.<br />He licked the glass as if it were porous<br />and some of the inside moisture might leak through.<br /><br />He died there.<br />I tried to tell him to move on,<br />that I lacked the power to let him in,<br />that he needed to look elsewhere.<br />But either he didn’t speak our language<br />or he just didn’t want to believe me.<br /><br />You shouldn’t think about him, the old man says.<br />He’s scary that way, hearing my thoughts.<br />People out there, they don’t concern us.<br />We’re separate now.<br />And even if you could have let him in,<br />where would it stop?<br /><br />He’d want to rescue a wife or a child.<br />They’d get a message to their cousins,<br />and then word would get out that all the water is in here.<br />It isn’t, but they’d say that.<br />And as long as we weren’t dead,<br />we’d have more than them<br />and feel like we had to let them in.<br />But every day we’d have a little less more,<br />until eventually we’d be dead too.<br />You can’t start something like that,<br />if you don’t know where it will end.<br /><br />I know he’s right.<br />But sometimes, sometimes,<br />sometimes the wishing builds up in me<br />until I think I might burst.<br />It wells up until it wants to roar down the mountains like a great river.<br />But what then?<br />I know there’s no sea to run to.<br /><br />In here, in here we look after each other.<br />We’d never just watch each other die.<br />Paradise is a place of love.<br />But how long could such soft feelings survive <br />in the harshness out there?<br />How long before the roaring river of my compassion<br />became a damp place in the endless sand<br />and then nothing?<br /><br />Do you still think about painting over the panels? he asks.<br />Just the lower ones, I say.<br />The ones about as high as my head.<br />It’s fine to look out and up.<br />I like it, most of the time.<br />What about the birds? he asks.<br /><br />I’d forgotten about them. <br />It was three years ago they came.<br />A whole flock. Migrators. <br />Our little puddle, we figure,<br />must have been a stopover<br />on the route of some ancestor.<br />(Going where? I wonder.)<br /><br />They sat up high on the Dome.<br />Feeling what, I can’t imagine.<br />Anger? anticipation? confusion? betrayal? hope?<br />Maybe they were just too tired to go on.<br />It took forever for the wind to push their bodies off.<br />And months more before I got back in the habit of looking up.<br /><br />I’m glad you didn’t start, the old man says.<br />Don’t start things, if you don’t know where they’ll end.http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2015/04/dome.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-2567494929330064347Thu, 30 Oct 2014 18:06:00 +00002014-10-30T14:09:01.919-04:00Religion and the Imagination, Bedford version<p>Almost exactly a year ago, I gave a talk “Religion and the Imagination” at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois. The text and audio of that Sunday service is <a href="http://uuquincy.org/talks/20131020.shtml">here</a>. (It’s slightly longer, and has two additional readings.)</p><p>This past Sunday, I updated that talk for my home church in Bedford, Massachusetts. You can watch that service <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDfMK9eclhU&amp;feature=youtu.be">here</a>, and also hear the choir do several thematic songs, including John Lennon’s “Imagine”. </p><p>All the text pieces of the Bedford service are in this post. </p><h4>Thought at the beginning (printed in the order of service)</h4><p>The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. — Jonathan Haidt</p><h4>Opening Words</h4><p>All [people] dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous ... for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible. — Lawrence of Arabia, <em>The Seven Pillars of Wisdom</em></p><h4>Readings</h4><p>From “<a href="http://www.bstock.com/FUSarchive/omeka-2.0.3/files/original/eaaf32c7696373e3b9114f3766e1f909.pdf">The Folly of Half-way Liberalism</a>” by John Dietrich (1930)</p><blockquote><p>The modern liberal … is constantly telling us that things are both this and that, instead of either this or that. Would that our modern liberal would take the bull by the horns and grapple decisively with that tremendous either-or. Either the things of which religion speaks are realities, or they are illusions. If they are realities, let us embrace them. If they are illusions, let us dismiss them. </p></blockquote><p>From “<a href="http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2013/09/23/how-my-daughter-taught-me-to-love-myth-making">How My Daughter Taught Me To Love Myth-Making</a>” by Kyle Cupp</p><blockquote><p>Today my daughter would have been four years old. Though Vivian is no longer with us, we will celebrate her birthday this evening, lighting a candle, and in its glow, dine and sing and share her story. We’ll do all this in memory of her.</p><p>Her older brother, now seven, has a few memories and mementos. Her younger sister knows her only by our pictures, treasured keepsakes, and our words. My wife and I contemplate her life as best we can with what we have left to us.</p><p>This is our ritual, our tradition, our own little family myth-making. It is how we, in an ever new present, give meaning to a life lived in an ever more distant past. It’s how we bridge the distance. It’s how we devote ourselves to someone now with us only in memory.</p><p>Vivian breathed, cooed, and gave us one loud cry when she was first carried through the cold hospital air. Not what I’d usually call major life accomplishments, but they were hers and about all she did. My own achievements seem insignificantly small next to the movements of the planets and the stars. If I can think the world of anyone’s small steps, I can think the world of hers.</p><p>What is the meaning of her life? What is the meaning of my own? I’ve come to believe that these are not questions with answers “out there” discoverable only if I search long enough, but questions I am called to answer creatively in my own small way, responding to the past from where I happen to be in the present moment, making something new for the future.</p><p>Vivian won’t be present for her party, so we will have to make her present.</p></blockquote><h4>Religion and the Imagination</h4><p>Why, a little girl once asked me, don’t grown-ups like to use their imaginations? Hidden in that question was a judgement and an accusation. At the time, we had just landed on a distant planet, and we had a mission that I kept losing track of. Her younger brother had a lot to add to the shared fantasy, but I could barely keep up. Why was I so dull, so unimaginative, so grown up?</p><p>That question stuck with me for months, especially when I was with children. And eventually an answer came to me: The adult imagination is every bit as vigorous as a child's, and we live surrounded by imaginary things. But rather than take credit for those imaginative products, we insist that they are real. </p><p>Much of a child’s education consists of learning to see what adults see, things that (strictly speaking) are not there. We see danger in streets that (at the moment) have no traffic. We see property lines, and invisible connections between objects and their owners. When the living room floor is cluttered, we see not just where things are, but also where they belong, and the system of organization that wants to pull them back into place. We see not just where we are in a room, but also where we are on the map and in the schedule and on the org chart. The left side of the highway looks physically different to us than the right side.</p><p>Kids don’t see any of that stuff until we teach them. Because it’s not real.</p><p>A few years ago I was in London with the LaFrance-Lindens. Jo-Jo was ten and Tommy seven. When they knew where we were going, they loved to run ahead, which got kind of scary in underground stations. The boys would thread their way through a crowd by racing up to within an inch of somebody, and then changing direction at the last instant like a halfback avoiding a linebacker. It was nerve-wracking to watch, but they never ran into anybody, and so it was hard to explain why they should slow down.</p><p>Eventually I realized that they simply did not see what I saw. I saw a bubble of personal space around each person. And so I saw the boys violently bashing their bubbles into other people’s bubbles. But they didn’t see that, because those bubbles were imaginary.</p><p>In some theories of physics, actual particles are surrounded by clouds of virtual particles, which probably aren’t there, but they could be; and somehow all that possibility needs to be accounted for. Similarly, in the adult world actual events are surrounded by clouds of virtual events: things that haven’t happened and maybe never will, but could. </p><p>So a child will set a glass of orange juice on the edge of a table and go on playing. But any adult who looks at that glass will instantly see all the ways it could be knocked off. It is as if the real glass were surrounded by virtual orange-juice glasses that have already toppled to the floor and broken. We see those broken glasses, but children don’t, because they’re not really there.</p><p>Some days a virtual event is the most striking thing that happens. Say you’re walking beside the Great Road holding a child’s hand. But your grip gets sweaty. She slips away, darts out into traffic, and in just a second or two is on the opposite sidewalk perfectly safe. A couple of cars screeched to a halt, but no real harm was done.</p><p>The girl will probably not think twice about that incident, because she experienced only what really happened. But you ... you saw all the virtual cars that didn’t stop in time and all the virtual little girls who were injured or maybe even killed. That’s what leaves you shaking, and what will come back to you in the middle of the night: not the real event, but the one you saw in your imagination.</p><p>Like children, we adults make our fantasies more elaborate and more stable by sharing them with others. A shared fantasy can seem to have an external reality, because even if it slips your mind, other people can keep it going and pull you back in. </p><p>But I like to run what I call the amnesia test: Test something's reality by asking whether it would still exist if we all forgot about it <em>at the same time</em>. For example, if one night we all forgot about the Sun, I’m pretty confident we'd rediscover it in the morning. And if we all forgot about gravity, I think it would regain our attention fairly quickly.</p><p>But on the other hand, if everyone simultaneously forgot that paper money has value, then it wouldn’t. Real as it may seem sometimes, money is an act of shared imagination. So are laws. If we all simultaneously forgot the laws, there wouldn’t be any. It’s our shared imagination that holds that system together.</p><p>Communities also fail the amnesia test. If I forgot about this church, I hope the rest of you would pull me back. “Where have you been?” you might say. “We miss you.” Or I might do the same for you.</p><p>But if we all forgot at the same time, First Parish would just be gone. Because the fundamental place this church exists isn’t in this building or in the legal structure of the bylaws, but in our imaginations. So if you new members are wondering exactly what you've signed up for, this is my answer: You've joined our shared fantasy, and we hope you'll lend the power of your imagination to the task of making this community as real as money or law.</p><p>Now, many of our social and cultural inventions serve some kind of purpose. So even if everybody forgot about them, they might eventually get replaced by something similar. Eventually there could be new communities and new laws and new economies that had some kind of currency. But I don’t believe those amnesiac people would rediscover the inherent worth of dollar bills or driving on the right. Because the value of those things is fundamentally imaginary.</p><p>But what would happen to the objects of religion? What would happen to God or the afterlife or souls? If everyone simultaneously forgot about those things would they be gone? Or are they as real as the Sun or gravity, so that we would have to rediscover them?</p><p>Reasonable people disagree about this, but personally I believe religion would be like law or money. New religions might develop. But the specifics of current religions — the theologies and cosmologies, the visions of Heaven and Hell and the plans of salvation that get us to one or the other — I believe those things would be gone, because they are products of imagination.</p><p>Now, for people who share my opinion, it’s easy to stop the thought experiment there and congratulate ourselves on how realistic we are: Jehovah and Allah and Zeus are imaginary; we don’t believe in them; aren’t we smart?</p><p>That self-congratulation is what I hear when atheists like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins compare God to the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. But I have a problem with that. Because it isn’t just other people’s God-based religions that fail the amnesia test. My own humanistic religion fails it too. </p><p>What would happen to, say, human rights if we all forgot about them? I think they’d be gone. Look at that list of Unitarian Universalist principles at the front of the hymnal. What would happen to the inherent worth and dignity of every person if we all stopped imagining it? What would happen to the right of conscience or the goal of world community? What would happen to the interdependent web of all existence? What would happen to something as venerable and glorious as Justice itself?</p><p>I think all those things would be gone. These things are not truths, they're visions, and they exist because we imagine them. And so that is another thing I believe you commit yourself to when you become a Unitarian Universalist: We're not asking you to commit yourself to believing in the truth of the principles, the way Christians commit themselves to the Apostles Creed. We're asking you to commit your imagination to envisioning the principles, to live as if everyone had worth and dignity, as if we were all part of an interdependent web, as if justice, equity, and compassion were as real as property or the banking system.</p><p>So where am I going with all this? My point is that John Dietrich's either-or question is the wrong one. It sets us up to keep having the wrong arguments about religion, arguments that will keep going round and round without convincing anyone. On one side, fundamentalists tell us that the objects of their religion — God, Heaven, and so on — are as real as the Sun or gravity. And so they are important and deserve respect. On the other side, atheists tell us that the objects of religion are imaginary like the Easter Bunny. And so they are unimportant and deserve scorn.</p><p>But what the amnesia test teaches me is that if God and the afterlife are imaginary, they do have something in common with the Easter Bunny. But they also have something in common with justice and human rights. Just because something comes from the human imagination doesn't mean that it isn't also important and deserving of respect.</p><p>The discussion we ought to be having is not whether the objects of religion are real, as if we ourselves stand in an unembellished reality and can reject the products of imagination whenever they invade our rock-solid realm. No, the discussion we ought to be having is why human beings have imagined these things, what we are trying to accomplish by imagining them, and which imaginative products best fulfill those purposes.</p><p>For example, when my father was dying, he used his imagination to envision a way that his life story might continue past his physical death. He imagined that he had a soul, and that when he died, his soul would live on in Heaven, a place where the souls of the dead go, where his wife and parents already were, and where his children might join him someday. </p><p>I didn't -- and don't -- believe in this vision. But that's not because I stand firmly in rock-solid reality and dismiss all imaginary things. I also use my imagination to envision my life as part of a story that does not end when my body dies. I do this by identifying with causes larger than myself, and by imagining connections between myself and the people who will carry on those struggles after me. </p><p>Tom Joad is doing something similar in <em>The Grapes of Wrath</em> when he says</p><blockquote><p>wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.</p></blockquote><p>That's vision. That's imagination. Humanists do it too.</p><p>Now, once you've had that realization, it's tempting to go relativistic: I imagine things, you imagine things ... it's all the same. But my point is different: Once we give up the pretense that our religion is realistic while their religion is fantasy, once we realize how important imagination is to everybody, then we're in a position to talk about the right issue: the difference between good imagination and bad imagination.</p><p>The reading about the birthday party for the girl who died in infancy is another example of this middle position. A fundamentalist might claim Kyle Cupp's family ritual speaks to a real soul in a real Heaven. An atheist might say that souls are not real, so there’s no point trying to “make Vivian present” on her birthday. She’s dead, so she’s not present, and that’s that.</p><p>But Cupp himself takes a more subtle view. He recognizes that Vivian’s presence is imaginary, but her imaginary presence is precisely the point. Without such a ritual, his ability to imagine Vivian would fade, and part of the meaning of his life would be gone. The ritual addresses a question whose answer is not “out there”, but one that he feels “called to answer creatively in my own small way.”</p><p>I don't think I can finish this talk without confessing just how far I've been willing to take these ideas in my own life. For a few years in the 80s and 90s, I had what should have been my ideal job as a mathematican: I made an industry-level salary, but had an almost academic level of freedom to research whatever interested me. </p><p>I thought I ought to be deliriously happy, and yet I wasn't, and I wondered why. So I asked myself: "What’s the difference between a good work day and a bad work day?" And the answer popped right into my mind: On a good day, I was motivated by a pure spirit of inquiry. I had questions I wanted to answer, so I just sat down and worked on them. But on a bad day, I fretted about the usual office stuff -- reviews and funding and promotions -- and the spirit of inquiry got lost.</p><p>And then I listened to what I had just said: “the Spirit of Inquiry”. Sure, it was a metaphor, a figure of speech. But the metaphor captured something. What my job had on its good days and lacked on its bad days was a reverent attitude of service. On my good days, my work was a kind of worship.</p><p>So I went with that. I created a one-man religion devoted to the Spirit of Inquiry. I drew a symbol for my religion on a big piece of paper and taped it to my desktop. All day long it was covered by my desk pad, so only I knew it was there. </p><p>When it was time to go home, I put my desk pad aside, looked at the symbol and asked how well I had served the Spirit of Inquiry that day. And then, whatever the answer, I would reverently put the four tools of my research -- compass, calculator, ruler, and pencil -- in their appropriate places on the symbol. The next morning, the symbol would be the first thing I saw when I came in. I would reverently ask the blessing of the Spirit, remove my tools, replace the desk pad, and begin my day.</p><p>I did that for years, as long as I had that job, and from those years of practice, I can report this about the worship of the Spirit of Inquiry: It worked. I became happier, saner, and more focused on what was important to me. And the Spirit never got out of hand. It never demanded sacrifices or made me its prophet or condemned my co-workers to Hell.</p><p>Now, a hard-line atheist might scornfully tell me that the Spirit of Inquiry is not real. I didn’t work in the presence of a deity, I just had an imaginary friend. In response, I could turn fundamentalist and argue for the Spirit’s reality. And if I were stubborn enough, that argument could go round and round, the way religious arguments do.</p><p>Or I could accept the content of the criticism and reject the scorn it carries: The Spirit isn’t real the way rocks and tables are real. It was a projection of my unconscious. I had an imaginary friend.</p><p>So?</p><p>If we make that shift, if we stop arguing about whether the objects of religion are real, and instead think about why we might imagine them and how well they serve the purposes we need them to serve, that opens a whole new conversation. Instead of questioning whether someone’s God is real, let’s talk about what is accomplished by envisioning that God. </p><p>If God is the organizing principle of someone’s life, what kind of life does God organize? Is it a life of compassion and generosity, or of self-centeredness and self-righteousness? Do worshippers open up to mystery and wonder, or embrace small-minded arrogance? Are they filled with awe and gratitude, or with a sense of special entitlement? Does a vision of the afterlife help people accept death, or fill them with guilt and anxiety? Does it give them confidence to live more fully, or does it freeze them into inaction or rationalize procrastination?</p><p>As I think we all know: It can go either way. In religion as anywhere else, the power of imagination can be used wisely or unwisely. </p><p>And once we recognize that, we face the challenge laid down by the philosopher Stan Lee: "With great power comes great responsibility."</p><p>If we tell ourselves that we just believe in what is real, we're not just fooling ourselves, we’re letting ourselves off the hook. Because reality can take care of itself, but visions need our participation. If justice is a vision, then it’s not enough to passively believe in it. We need to make it real. We need to practice envisioning justice, so that it will always be present to us and not wink out when we need it most. </p><p>If the inherent worth of each person and the interconnected web of all existence are visions rather than facts, then we need to invoke those visions, experience them, and pass them on to others. </p><p>And if a community like First Parish exists primarily in our imaginations, then we need to do more than just join and attend or even contribute. We also need to share our visions of what this community is and what it means and what it could be. A church is a vessel for shared imagination. So if we're not regularly filling that vessel and then drinking from it when our personal visions falter, we're missing the point.</p><p>Or, on the other hand, we could be asking ourselves what kinds of visions we need and the world needs. We could commit ourselves to that envisioning process and do it together, pooling our imaginative power to resist the cynical and nihilistic forces of the larger culture. If we did that, then, I believe, we would truly be using our imaginations like grown ups.</p><h4>Closing Words</h4><p>Adapted from “It Matters What We Believe” by Sophia Lyons Fahs:</p><blockquote><p>It matters what we imagine.</p><p>Some visions are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged. Other visions are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.</p><p>Some visions are like shadows, clouding children's days with fears of unknown calamities. Other visions are like sunshine, blessing children with the warmth of happiness.</p><p>Some visions are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies. Other visions are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern.</p><p>Some visions are like blinders, shutting off the power to choose one's own direction. Other visions are like gateways opening wide vistas for exploration.</p><p>Some visions weaken a person's selfhood. They blight the growth of resourcefulness. Other visions nurture self-confidence and enrich the feeling of personal worth.</p><p>Some visions are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world. Other visions are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life.</p></blockquote><p style="margin: 0px 0px 6px; text-align: justify; font-size: 12px;"> </p>http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2014/10/religion-and-imagination-bedford-version.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-6196564870482885747Fri, 26 Sep 2014 12:48:00 +00002014-09-26T08:49:11.957-04:00Scavenging Crusoe's Ship: dealing with the legacy of traditional religion<p style="text-align: center;"><em>a talk presented at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois (the town where I grew up)</em></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Meditation</h4><p>Edith Wharton said: "There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle, or the mirror that reflects it."</p><h4>Readings</h4><p>I’ve found that I don’t have to believe a theology to appreciate its beauty. And of all the Christian theologies I know, I think the most beautiful one comes from the early 19th century Universalist Hosea Ballou.</p><p>Orthodox Christians of Ballou’s day taught — as many still do — that human sin made God angry, and that his anger could not be put aside until someone had been punished. According a the doctrine called <em>substitutional atonement</em>, that was what Jesus did: he took the punishment on himself, so that anyone who believed in him could escape God’s anger and have salvation.</p><p>Early Universalists like John Murray had extended this notion of atonement by saying that Jesus’ payment was good for everybody, whether they believed or not. So everyone was going to Heaven.</p><p>But Hosea Ballou turned the whole atonement doctrine upside down. God’s love, Ballou said, was unshakeable, and so he had never been angry with us, much less desired our eternal punishment. Sin had affected not God, but us. It caused us to lose our awareness of God’s love. And feeling unloved, we became angry with God. [Interestingly, this same motif —the creature who is angry with his Creator because he feels unloved —shows up 13 years later in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.] So in Ballou’s theology, that’s why Jesus had to come: not to appease God’s anger, but to appease our anger at God, by showing us that we had always been loved.</p><p>In Ballou’s view, all those theologies of a wrathful God were what later psychologists would call projections: Picturing God to be as vicious and small-minded as we are, theologians had hidden their anger with him behind the anger they imagined he had for us. In this reading from Ballou’s 1805 classic <em>A Treatise on Atonement</em>, he summed that projection up in a wonderful metaphor:</p><blockquote><p>Unhappily, men have looked at Deity through the medium of a carnal mind, and have formed all <em>their</em> evil tempers in <em>Jehovah</em>; like the deceived astronomer, who fancied he saw a monster in the sun, occasioned by a fly on his glass. The creature, being in the medium of sight, was supposed to be in the object beheld; and though it was small in itself, and would have appeared so, could it have been seen where it was; yet carrying it into the sun, it magnified to an enormous size. </p><p>So it is with the vile and sinful passions. Could we behold them in ourselves, and view them as they are, they would appear in their finite and limited sphere. But the moment we form those passions in Deity, they magnify to infinity.</p><p>How many various calculations have divines made on the <em>fury</em> and <em>wrath</em> which they have discovered in God! How much they have preached and written on the awful subject; and how many ways they have invented, to appease such wrath and vengeance! </p><p>When we come to see the error, and find those principles in ourselves, all those notions vanish at once. The fly on the glass might easily have been removed, or destroyed. But had there been a monster in the sun, what calculations could mortals have made to remove it?</p></blockquote><p>Nearly a century later, William James gave the lectures that became <em>The Varieties of Religious Experience</em>. In one lecture he collected case studies of what he called saintly behavior. And in the next lecture he asked a question that until that moment had been completely unthinkable: What was saintliness good for? And he answered it like this:</p><blockquote><p>Herbert Spencer tells us that the perfect man’s conduct will appear only when the environment is perfect: to no inferior environment is it suitably adapted. We may paraphrase this by cordially admitting that saintly conduct would be the most perfect conduct conceivable in an environment where all were saints already; but by adding that in an environment where few are saints, and many the exact reverse of saints, it must be ill adapted. </p><p>We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. The powers of darkness have systematically taken advantage of them. The whole modern scientific organization of charity is a consequence of the failure of simply giving alms. The whole history of constitutional government is a commentary on the excellence of resisting evil, and when one cheek is smitten, of smiting back and not turning the other cheek also. </p><p>You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoy, you believe in the excellence of fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers. </p><p>And yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined to these hard-headed, hard-hearted, and hard-fisted methods exclusively, were there no one prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwards whether he were worthy; no one willing to drown his private wrongs in pity for a wronger’s person; no one ready to be duped many a time rather than live always on suspicion; no one glad to treat individuals passionately and impulsively, rather than by general rules of prudence; the world would be an infinitely worse place than it is now to live in. The tender grace, not of a day that is dead, but of a day yet to be born somehow, with the golden rule grown natural, would be cut out from the perspective our of imaginations.</p></blockquote><h4>Talk</h4><p>I’m not sure how obvious this has been, but most of the talks I’ve given here over the last few years have had a common theme: What should we do with the legacy of traditional religion?</p><p>As you know, I was raised as a fairly conservative Lutheran, believing in the literal, historical truth of the Bible — the Flood, Jonah inside the whale, and all the rest. God was a real person, and Heaven and Hell were real places. </p><p>Many of you were also brought up in more orthodox traditions. And even if you weren’t, Christianity so dominates this culture that it’s nearly impossible to avoid having an opinion about it and a relationship to it. </p><p>Even if you personally don’t have a history with Christianity, Unitarianism and Universalism do. That’s why we meet on Sunday mornings and sit in pews and sing hymns. The great names of our history, people like William Ellery Channing and Hosea Ballou, interpreted the Bible very differently than most other preachers of their day, but God was very real to them, and the Bible and Jesus were very important.</p><p>So both individually and as a Unitarian Universalist, what should I do with that legacy? In one way or another, that’s what I keep talking about.</p><p>And I think I’ve made some of you nervous, with all the times I’ve read to you from the Bible or quoted some saint. Because you know how that goes: A Bible-quoting person may sound reasonable at first, but sooner or later he’s going to work around to explaining why you’re going to Hell. </p><p>I think that’s why many Unitarian Universalists feel that we have to go one way or the other. Either reject that Christian legacy firmly and leave it all behind, or eventually the currents of the larger culture will pull us back in.</p><p>I haven’t been taking either of those paths. So what have I been up to?</p><p>In my own mind, I sum it up with an image from <em>Robinson Crusoe</em>. Crusoe has run away from England, where his parents wanted to make him a lawyer, and after a number of adventures he has become a plantation owner in Brazil. Subsequently, he is sailing to Africa to get slaves when a storm wrecks his ship. Everyone else drowns, and he washes up on a deserted island. After spending an anxious night in a tree, the next morning he sees that the ship did not go to the bottom, but has gotten stuck on a sandbar close to shore. </p><p>At this point there are three ways the story could go. Crusoe could ignore the ship and say, “I’m not going anywhere near that death trap.” Or, if the story were more of a fairy tale, he could repair the ship, and single-handedly sail it home. </p><p>What he actually does, though, is build a raft, and scavenge the ship for the things he needs to survive on the island: food, clothing, a hunting rifle, and so on. But one thing is worth more than all the rest. When he finds the carpenter’s chest of tools, he describes it as “much more valuable than a ship-loading of gold”.</p><p>Maybe you can already guess where I’m going with this metaphor. For me, traditional Christianity is a wrecked ship. It didn’t take me where I thought it was supposed to go, and when it all fell apart on me I considered myself lucky to wash up where I did. </p><p>Now, I understand that the old-time religion is not a shipwreck for everyone. Back in 1966, when <em>Time</em> magazine’s cover asked “Is God Dead?” one of the churches here in town answered on its signboard: “Our God is alive. Sorry about yours.” </p><p>I have no complaint with that viewpoint. If traditional religion is working for you, if it gives you a sense of direction and purpose, and makes you a more loving, more compassionate person, then I have no desire to talk you out of it.</p><p>But the Christianity I was raised in is a shipwreck for me. And yet, it didn’t sink to the bottom of the ocean. There it still is, run aground, but within swimming range. What to do with it? </p><p>Some people will say: “Get as far away from it as you can.” And others will say, “Maybe it’s not as far gone as you think. If you fix it up a little, it might still get you home.” But I want to do something else. I want to scavenge it for tools.</p><p>That theme has been running through almost all my talks. One by one I’ve been picking up pieces of the old religion and not asking “Is this true? What are the arguments pro and con?” but rather “What is this for? What does it do? Can I make use of it? And if not, can I reverse-engineer something from it that I can use?” That approach, I’ve found, takes me out of the usual religious arguments that go round and round without convincing anybody, and sets me on a path I find more productive.</p><p>So <a href="http://uuquincy.org/talks/20130331.shtml">when I led the Easter service</a>, I spent no time at all on whether the historical Jesus did or did not rise from the dead. Instead, I looked at the tradition of spring holidays like Easter, Passover, and the pagan equinox, and I asked, “What do these holidays do? What are they for? Is there something an appropriately constructed spring holiday could do for us?”</p><p>And I concluded that there was. A spring holiday could be an occasion to re-examine our commitment to life, to ask ourselves whether we’ve really been living, or just marking time and getting by, waiting for the bad times to end. It could be a time to re-commit, to leave our safe but joyless places and start doing more with the gift of life. In short, we could reverse engineer Easter and make it our tool.</p><p>Another time, <a href="http://uuquincy.org/talks/20110403.shtml">I talked about the afterlife</a>. And again, I spent no time at all discussing whether or not Heaven is real. Instead, I asked, “What does the afterlife do? What is it for?” And I decided that of all the things it did, the one I envied most was that the afterlife helps people project their life stories into the future in a satisfying way. It helps them motivate future-directed action, in spite of the fact that they may not live to see the results. And then I discussed secular techniques for telling a life story that achieve a similar purpose. That was how I reverse engineered the afterlife.</p><p>The tool that I want to reverse engineer today is the love of God. Not the love that the believer has for God, but the love that supposedly streams down from Heaven onto all of God’s creatures. </p><p>When I read Hosea Ballou, the love of God comes to seem like a very real thing, not just an abstract principle or a phrase in some recited creed, but a powerful presence that he felt every moment of his life. </p><p>Universalists in Ballou’s day always ran into the argument that Hell was necessary. Without the threat of Hell, critics said, people would do whatever wickedness they thought they could get away with — steal, cheat, kill, whatever. And so, they thought, Universalists must constantly fall prey to all manner of temptation, and a Universalist church must be a complete den in iniquity.</p><p>Ballou always responded to these arguments with bewilderment. Because he knew that if you lived with a constant awareness of God’s love, if you felt it shining down on you every moment of every day, filling you with the joy of life, then what could you possibly do but reflect that love out onto others? In Ballou’s theology, sin didn’t mean giving in to pleasure, it meant turning away from the greatest pleasure of all, which was to bask in the unshakeable love of God.</p><p>Now, a theologian might examine whether Ballou’s perception was accurate: Is there really a God? Does that God love us constantly and unconditionally? Or does he instead love us when we’re good and hate us when we’re bad?</p><p>But as a religious engineer, as a scavenger on the shipwreck of faith, I ask a different question: That vision of the love of God — what did it do for Ballou? And when does my own life make me wish for a tool like that?</p><p>My answer is probably not what Ballou would have expected. Like his critics, Ballou was focused on the question: Why be good? The orthodox Christian answered with the threat of Hell, and Ballou answered with the love of God. Both would have expected doubters to struggle with that question.</p><p>But in fact we don’t. Contrary to expectation, ethics seems to come from somewhere deeper than theology. In my own life, there have been times when I believed in God and times when I didn’t. I can’t tell that it made any difference in how good I was. And whether you believe in some kind of God or not, I expect most of you have enough experience with atheists and agnostics to notice the same thing I have: that their overall morality is no worse than that of believers, and maybe even a little better sometimes.</p><p>No, when I try on Ballou’s vision of the love of God, I see a different benefit. My problem isn’t why to be good or how to be good, but that when I try too hard to be good, I burn out. Trying to be a giving person, a compassionate person, somebody who listens to everyone and takes their problems to heart, who (as James said in the reading) is “ready to be duped many a time rather than live always on suspicion” — it very quickly gets to be too much.</p><p>Maybe you feel it too. Every news cycle brings new horrors and atrocities. Do I really have to care about ebola in Africa or what climate change is doing to Bangladesh? About every panhandler who accosts me on the street? About every bad day in the lives of all my Facebook friends? It’s overwhelming.</p><p>James observed that his world was not conducive to sainthood, and ours seems even less so. In today’s consumer society, you are surrounded 24/7 by people who want something from you — your money, your attention, your time and effort. And if they can give you little or nothing back,so much the better.</p><p>To be a good person in such a world, to be caring and giving and compassionate, can make you feel like the only warm-blooded animal in a swamp full of mosquitoes. The constant pinpricks, losing a drop of blood here and another there, and feeling nothing afterwards but irritation. How long can you live like that?</p><p>One summer when I was feeling particularly burnt out, I spent a lot of time sitting in the sunlight. It was satisfying in a primal way that it took all summer for me to put words around. What I loved about the Sun was that it was too big for me to affect. The Sun couldn’t want anything from me, because there was nothing I could do for it. And yet, it shone down on me anyway. That was what I needed.</p><p>And that’s what Ballou gets from his vision of the love of God. Ballou’s God is too big and and too grand to spend his time weighing the virtues and vices of us tiny creatures. He just shines. And when you feel his love shining down on you, what can you do but reflect it out?</p><p>Ballou’s theology has a kind of balance that secular visions of goodness often lack. Love flows in, love flows out. Ballou doesn’t see himself as a generator of the world’s love. The generator is elsewhere. He is just part of the distribution network. In Edith Wharton's terms, he sees himself as a mirror, not a candle. And mirrors don’t burn out.</p><p>One thing a religious engineer knows is that not everybody can use every tool. Just because it would be convenient to believe something, that doesn’t mean you can. I feel that very strongly when I contemplate Ballou’s God and imagine experiencing the power of his love. I can envy that experience, and I can try on the worldview that evokes it. But it doesn’t stick. I don’t seem to be capable of maintaining a belief in that kind of God.</p><p>So what can I do? Is there a tool I can use that is like God’s love, that works on that same problem in a similar way? </p><p>When you hold a question like that in your mind, sometimes clues turn up in the most unlikely places. I used to watch HBO’s gangster series, <em>The Sopranos</em>. (Talk about a world that is not conducive to sainthood.) I loved the theme song:</p><p style="text-align: center;"><em>You woke up this morning, got yourself a gun.<br />Mama always said you’d be the chosen one. </em></p><p>And the next line I couldn’t make out until I looked it up on the internet. It says:</p><p style="text-align: center;"><em>You’re one in a million, you gotta burn to shine. </em></p><p>You gotta burn to shine. That’s the problem in a nutshell. Hosea Ballou didn’t have to burn to shine. He could just reflect the light streaming down from God. </p><p>But if you are trying to shine in the darkness, if you are one shining person surrounded by a million others, who suck up that light and reflect nothing back, then the only way you can keep shining is to burn some kind of fuel inside yourself. And since people are finite, someday you’ll burn it all up.</p><p>That’s the problem with shining in the darkness, shining alone, shining as one in a million. People can’t do that for long, because it’s unbalanced. In the long run, goodness doesn’t <em>come from</em> us, it has to <em>flow through</em> us. We can hope to amplify it a little, to give a little better than we get, but we can’t generate goodness out of nothing, not for long.</p><p>Ballou’s theology helps him cope with that limitation. By imagining an ultimate source of goodness, of light and love and joy and inspiration, by calling that source God, and placing it at the center of his world, Ballou was forcing himself to pay attention to that side of the equation.</p><p>Whenever he began to feel drained and cynical (as I’m sure he must have at times), his theology told him to work on his relationship with God, to read and pray and meditate and do all the other things that nourished his soul. Activities that in a secular framing might seem self-centered, his theology re-cast as centered on God.</p><p>We can learn from that. Yes, it’s vitally important that goodness flow out of you, that you do good things and make the world brighter. But that’s not sustainable unless something is also flowing into you, unless your antenna is attuned to the sources of goodness in your life.</p><p>Sources. Did you catch what I did there? I made it plural. Because if I can’t maintain a belief in one ultimate source, I also can’t deny that many things in life nourish me, restore me, and make it possible for me to keep shining: the Sun, obviously. The beauty of Nature. Also the created beauty of art and music and literature. Sometimes through museums or books I can feel the brilliance shining from those ancient masters, as if they were distant stars whose light is just reaching us now.</p><p>Through the media, I also receive the gifts of today’s artists and musicians, as well as the stories of scientists searching for truth, activists fighting for justice, and all those compassionate people who are healing the sick and feeding the hungry and grieving with those who have suffered enormous losses. Their examples also keep me shining.</p><p>But, you know, there’s no substitute for the people you meet face to face. And that’s why I belong to a congregation.</p><p>That’s something that puzzles a lot of people about Unitarian Universalists. They can sort of get that we have a different philosophy and look at life a different way. But why do we do the church thing? Why do you come here? Nothing we do this morning will get you to Heaven or forgive your sins, or improve your chances in the lottery. So why did you come?</p><p>For me, it’s that I need to be in the presence of people who are trying to shine, who are trying to give something to the world rather than just take as much as they can. That’s what draws me to my congregation at home, and that’s what I see here.</p><p>I only spend a weekend or two a year in Quincy, so there are only a few of you that I know to any depth, and I’m sure all of you do many things I never hear about. But even with my limited exposure I feel nourished and inspired and energized by the glow of this community.</p><p>I’m inspired, for example, when I drop by the mechanic’s workshop that Joe has turned into his studio. Because here’s somebody at a point in life where he can do pretty much what he wants, and what he wants to do is make beautiful things. I’m inspired by Carol, and so many others here who make music and look for ways to share it with the world. I’m energized by the infectious enthusiasm of Mike talking about restoring cool old cars, or when Rob brings up long-dead philosophers as if they were personal friends that he’s sure I’d hit it off with. More people than I have time to name have told me about community projects or political causes that they support and work on, not because they’ll benefit personally, but just to make the world better.This is a community full of people who want to shine, who have found a source of joy in life and want to share it.</p><p>Two years ago, when my father was dying, I felt this community’s light very personally. Several of you made sure that when I didn’t have to be at the nursing home or the hospital, I had somewhere to go and someone to talk to when I got there. I will always be grateful for that.</p><p>There is a lot of light shining in this community, and a lot of places to look for nurturance and inspiration.</p><p>But you do have to look. You have to pay attention. Opening up to the sources of light and love and joy and inspiration in a Unitarian Universalist church today may not sound as important as opening up to the love of God was in a 19th-century Universalist church. But it is, because that’s how you balance the equation.</p><p>If you don’t, then this all becomes just another drain, another set of responsibilities, another list of good deeds to do. There’s money to give and classes to teach and social action projects to organize and committees to chair and somebody has to make the coffee and on and on and on. More mosquitoes. More drops of blood. More irritation.</p><p>If you just keep your head down and work, you can start to believe that you are a single light shining in the darkness, and that the only way to keep shining is to keep burning up something finite and precious inside yourself. That misses the whole point of a Unitarian congregation. Lights are shining around you. On a regular basis, you need to look up and just bask in the glow.</p><p>The closing hymn is # 118, “This Little Light of Mine”. But before we sing, I have to confess that until recently I never liked this song, because I sang it wrong. I thought it was all about me promising to shine brighter, to do more. And where was the energy for that going to come from?</p><p>I was missing the significance of singing the song <em>together</em>. This isn’t just about you promising to shine brighter for others, it’s also about the rest of us promising to shine brighter for you. So as you sing, don’t just make a promise, accept the promises of the people around you. Not all of those promises will be fulfilled, but many will be. You aren’t going to have to shine alone. This community is full of light and love and the desire to give and create and do good. You don’t have to generate that, you just need to conduct it and reflect it out into the world.</p><p>So let’s sing.</p>http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2014/09/scavenging-crusoe-ship-dealing-with.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-1496857761865802828Wed, 23 Apr 2014 19:17:00 +00002014-04-23T15:17:25.672-04:00Acceptance and ActionThe text of the talk "<a href="http://uuquincy.org/talks/20140406.shtml" target="_blank">Acceptance and Action</a>" that I gave April 6 at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, IL is up on their website. This is a little more personal than most of my talks. It starts with the story of my wife's breast cancer, and works around to the question: "When we talk about reaching acceptance, what exactly should we be trying to accept?"http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2014/04/acceptance-and-action.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-4643366547625401395Tue, 18 Mar 2014 12:31:00 +00002015-09-17T06:35:48.943-04:00Recovery From Privilege<h4><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">a sermon given March 16, 2014 by Doug Muder at First Parish in Billerica, Mass. </span></i></h4><h4>Readings</h4>These days when someone says that you’re in denial, they usually mean that you need to change. In our current thinking, denial is bad, so you need to start down the road to acceptance, which is good.<br /><br />But an older folk wisdom takes a more favorable view of denial. Life is complicated, and thinking is hard. So if you don’t know how to think about some topic constructively, you might be better off not thinking about it.<br /><br />That wisdom gets passed on to young Nick Adams at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s story “<a href="http://liternet.bg/publish24/e_hemingway/killers.htm">The Killers</a>”. Professional hit men have commandeered the diner where Nick eats, because they want to kill one of the other regulars, Ole Anderson. Eventually the killers decide Anderson isn’t coming and leave to look for him elsewhere, so Nick races to warn him. But Anderson is so resigned to his fate he can’t be convinced to do anything other than wait in his room for the killers to find him.<br /><br />Later, back at the diner, Nick says to George, the owner: "I can't stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it. It's too damned awful."<br /><br />"Well," the older man advises, "you better not think about it."<br /><br />The second reading is from <i>White Like Me</i>, the autobiography in which Tim Wise calls attention to all the times when being white has made a difference in his life. One day while he was in college, Tim had his girlfriend’s car. He was about to go pick her up from class when he realized he had locked the keys inside. Annoyed, he got a wire hanger out of the apartment, and started trying to break in. He writes: <br /><blockquote>Unfortunately, the 1988 Toyota Tercel is among the hardest cars on earth into which one may break, which is ironic, considering how few people could possibly want to steal one. No matter my truly veteran efforts to open the door, I was having no luck even after ten minutes. </blockquote><blockquote>It was then, as I was furiously bending the hanger back and forth, trying desperately to jam it between the metal door frame and the rubber insulation around the window, that a police car pulled up. The officer hopped out and approached me. </blockquote><blockquote>"What’s going on here?" he asked, more curious than accusatory. </blockquote><blockquote>"I locked myself out of my car and I’ve got to pick up my girlfriend in like five minutes," I replied, exasperated with my shitty luck. I fully expected the officer to ask me for identification or some kind of proof that this was my car, which only goes to show how little I understood about the value of white skin in the eyes of law enforcement. </blockquote><blockquote>"Well, I can tell you right now," he interjected. "The problem is, you’re doing that all wrong." </blockquote><blockquote>"Excuse me?" I replied, not having expected to be told by a police officer than I lacked the necessary acumen to break into a car the right way. </blockquote><blockquote>"Yeah, that’s no way to break into a car," he insisted. "Let me show you how it’s done."</blockquote>W. E. B. DuBois was one of the leading black intellectuals of the early 20th century. In his classic <i>The Souls of Black Folk</i>, he describes the other side of privilege: How it feels to live in a world where “normal” means “not like you”, and your mere presence and your desire to be included makes “normal” society uncomfortable.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.&nbsp;</blockquote>Peggy McIntosh is famous for her insight that privilege is obvious when someone else has it, but hard to see when you have it yourself. She captured that observation in the metaphor of the Invisible Knapsack, a set of assets that you can’t see because they’re on your back, but that will come in handy if you need them.<br /><br />She learned this lesson the hard way. As a professor of women’s studies, she taught college students how to recognize male privilege. But in the 1980s black feminists began writing about how oppressive white feminists could be, and after she worked through the shock of being seen as an oppressor, McIntosh realized that the same privilege patterns that gave men unfair advantages over women like her also gave whites like her unfair advantages over people of color. Her ideas were taken more seriously because the racial stereotypes say that white people are smart, and it was easier for her to get grants because stereotypic whites can be trusted to handle money.<br /><br />Even in her own mind, she found unjustified assumptions of superiority, assumptions that of course she would have the answer, she would take the lead, she would be the spokesman. Because white people do that.<br /><br />McIntosh had always imagined herself standing outside the citadel of privilege, demanding that the people in there change. Now she found herself inside the citadel wondering: How do I change?<br /><br />A quarter century later, Peggy McIntosh is a grandmotherly woman who radiates a sense of wisdom, kindness, and inner peace, as you can see online in the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-BY9UEewHw" target="_blank">2012 TED talk</a> this quote comes from.<br /><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">And then I decided, because this work was spreading in many places, I needed to help with the matter of white guilt. I don’t believe we can be guilty or ashamed or blamed for being born into systems both above and below the hypothetical line of social justice. They’re arbitrary. They have to do with projections onto us. … I don’t think blame, shame, or guilt are relevant to the arbitrariness of our placement in privilege systems. … </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">So beside [the metaphor of the Invisible Knapsack] I decided to put a second metaphor: white privilege as a bank account that I was given. I didn’t ask for it and I can’t be blamed for it. But I can decide to put it in the service of weakening the system of white privilege. </blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">That is my energy, that is my financial commitment, that is my daily life, and it’s been transformative to use my bank account of white privilege to weaken the system. It has absolutely transformed my life to be in work that feels right… [This transformation] is not based on guilt. I don’t know exactly the wording for it. … [But] it has been transformative to use the power that I did not know, I was never taught that I had, in the service of kinder, fairer, and more compassionate life for everyone. </blockquote><h4>Sermon</h4>One of the issues I write about on <a href="http://weeklysift.com/" target="_blank">my political blog</a> is privilege -- the unearned and unfair advantages you may get if you belong to certain favored groups. In the readings you heard about male privilege and white privilege, but there’s also straight privilege, first-world privilege, and many, many others.<br /><br />And I have almost all of them.<br /><br />So when my blog's commenters try to change the subject, or when people in conversation roll their eyes as if to say, "Oh God, not this again", I get where they're coming from. Thinking about privilege makes them uncomfortable, they don't know what they're expected to do about it, and besides, no matter how successful they might be, they don't <i>feel</i> privileged. Nobody handed them success in life. They had talent, they worked hard.<br /><br />Me too. I remember staying up far into the night, working on my Ph.D. in mathematics and doubting that I could really do this. It sure didn't feel like anybody was <i>giving</i> me anything.<br /><br />So I had a certain amount of sympathy when an anonymous commenter responded to <a href="http://weeklysift.com/2012/09/10/the-distress-of-the-privileged/" target="_blank">my most popular post</a> with: "Once again, I need to feel bad for being white and male.”<br /><br />I've been there, so I knew what he was saying: "You're trying to make me feel guilty about something I didn't do and can't do anything about, so I'm just not going to have that conversation."<br /><br />What could I possibly say to that?<br /><br />What I wanted to say is that while I sympathize, the point of discussing privilege isn't to punish people for their sins by making them feel bad. It's to raise awareness of the unfairness in the world and motivate change.<br /><br />And on a personal level, I wanted to tell him that his bad feeling is just temporary. It marks the beginning of a recovery process that (if he pursues it) will go somewhere good.<br /><br />But is that true? What process would that be and what good place does it go to?<br /><br /><b>Smooth lives and bumpy lives.</b> Let me start by observing that anybody who is justifying his decision not to think about privilege has already come a long way. For starters, he understands that there's something to think about. That's no small realization, because as obvious as it is from the outside, Peggy McIntosh was right: Privilege is hard to see when you have it.<br /><br />Privilege is more subtle now than in the days of “Whites Only” signs and jobs explicitly reserved for men. Today, it is most likely to show up in the things that don’t happen to the privileged, like when Tim Wise <i>didn’t</i> get arrested for breaking into his girlfriend's car.<br /><br />If you’re not looking for them, these non-events can go right past you. Two years ago, I was headed for the UU General Assembly in Phoenix, where we were going to protest S.B. 1070, the Arizona law that made it risky for Hispanics to wander around without proper ID and proof of their immigration status. Ironically, at Logan I discovered that I had misplaced my own ID. You know what happened then? Not much. TSA respectfully asked me a few questions, but I made my flight. And then I spent a week in Arizona completely undocumented. No one cared, because I'm an Anglo. I didn't have to stick to the shadows or avoid police. Everything went smoothly.<br /><br />That's most of what it means to have privilege today: Your life is smooth in ways that other people's lives are bumpy. And while it's easy to recognize the bumps in your life, smoothness tends to fade into the background.<br /><br />My life has flowed smoothly in lots of other ways I didn't think about at the time. When I looked for work, I could focus on proving that <i>I </i>could do the job, because no one questioned that <i>a white man</i> could do the job. After I was hired, I could just dress in the morning without wondering if I might be inviting sexual harassment, and if a boss asked me to stay late, I didn't have to worry about his motives, or what my co-workers might assume. All my life, I have had the luxury of walking into interviews or meetings or government offices confident in the assumption that I am normal, and so of course the system will be set up to handle my needs. That's an advantage I have over&nbsp; W. E. B. DuBois: Nobody wants to ask me what it’s like to be a problem.<br /><br />Smoothness like that slides right by. Bumps are what stand out. So privilege is easy to ignore, if you have it. You don't need denial, because you don't realize there's anything to deny.<br /><br /><b>Until... </b>Until something happens that you can't ignore. Maybe you turned on your TV and saw the people trapped at the SuperDome after Hurricane Katrina. The whole world was watching, but no one was in a hurry to help them because they were too poor and too black to matter. Maybe you saw that and thought: That can't be right.<br /><br />Moments like that are when you begin to need denial. And people are happy to provide it for you. Whatever injustice you may have noticed, the talking heads on TV will reassure you that the victims made mistakes, so it's their own fault. Or this is a totally unique event unrelated to how the world usually works. Or there was a problem but it’s fixed now, so you can forget about it. You can go back to your smooth life and other people will go back to their bumpy lives and you don't have to worry about them.<br /><br />Until something else happens. Maybe you noticed the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh last spring, the one that killed over a thousand workers. The outer walls were already visibly bending when the morning shift showed up, but the bosses sent them in anyway. And they obeyed, because people that poor are more scared of losing their jobs than of the roof falling in.<br /><br />And why are third-world workers exploited like that? So that I can pay fifty cents less for my shirts. I never demanded that benefit, but that's how the global economy works. And of course no one asked me or you or any of the other shoppers whether we wanted that, because we’re supposed to believe that all those beautiful products appear on the shelves by magic. If we stopped to wonder who made them, we might ask how they live, or if they're even still alive. And depressing thoughts like that could ruin our whole retail experience.<br /><br />Once you glimpse the injustice that is built into the system and see how it works to your benefit, those simple explanations that helped you ignore it start to wear thin. Eventually you realize that you are actively avoiding the whole topic. And at that point, you don't just need denial, you a need a justification for your denial. You need to be able to explain why you are right not to think about this.<br /><br />You've come a long way.<br /><br />That's where my commenter had gotten. He deserves some credit for having made it that far.<br /><br /><b>Guilty Liberals. </b>Now let's look at the particular justification he chose. It's a popular one. I've run into it many times and I’ve been tempted to use it myself.<br /><br />It goes like this: The only reason people bring up privilege at all is to make me feel guilty. And I shouldn't, because I didn't do it. I didn't create the injustice in the world. I’m not conspiring against blacks or gays or third-world workers or anybody else. I’m just living my smooth life. Other people's bumpy lives are not my fault.<br /><br />And besides, I can’t fix it. Injustice is bottomless. I’m never going to fill that hole or get rid of that guilt no matter how much I give or do. I’m always going to be white, I’m always going to be a man, and people are always going to blame me for their problems.<br /><br />The stereotype that goes with this defense is the person nobody wants to be, the Guilty Liberal -- always agonizing about some imaginary thing he did to somebody, always looking for some kind of forgiveness or redemption that never comes. And he won't be happy until he's made everybody else feel as guilty as he does.<br /><br />If you listen to the kind of talk radio that's popular among white men, that's the choice you're offered: You can be a Guilty Liberal and make yourself and everybody else miserable. Or you can just refuse to discuss this whole topic. If somebody starts talking about white privilege or male privilege or whatever, just shut the whole conversation down right there.<br /><br />And you know, if those really were the only options — be a Guilty Liberal or refuse to think about it — denial really would make some sense. As George advised Nick Adams, if an idea is too damned awful and you don't know any constructive way to think about it, then you better not think about it.<br /><br /><b>Hope and courage. </b>When you meet someone who is dug in like that -- who refuses to think about something and believes that he's<i> right</i> not to think about it -- the worst thing you can do is to pound on the exact spot where his defenses are concentrated. As Sun Tzu says in The Art of War: "The worst strategy of all is to besiege walled cities."<br /><br />So if you just get louder and more aggressive about racism and sexism and how horrible this guy is, you're fitting right into his frame. You're just another Guilty Liberal trying to make him unhappy. So instead, I think we need to draw a lesson from our Universalist heritage, from that famous John Murray quote: "Give them not Hell, but hope and courage."<br /><br />What my commenter needs to hear is not a stronger indictment of his white male privilege, but the hopeful message that there really is a way to think about this and deal with it.<br /><br />He needs to hear the good news of social justice: That what he feels whenever he thinks honestly about his unfair advantages is not something he is condemned to either shove out of his mind or wallow in for the rest of his life. It is a wound that can be healed, and we know how to heal it. <br /><br />But is that true? Do we know how to heal it?"<br /><br />I think we do. <br /><br /><b>Guilt?</b> The first step in healing is to get the diagnosis right. If you meditate on your own privileges and bring that bad feeling to mind, one of the things I believe you'll notice is that it actually isn't guilt.<br /><br />There's guilt bound up in it, because most of us have abused our privileges at one time or another. Maybe we’ve told jokes that, in retrospect, were more cruel than funny. Or we’ve made decisions without thinking about their consequences for others. Or based our judgments more on stereotypes than on knowledge. Maybe we’ve felt superior to people who never had a fair chance to compete with us.<br /><br />So sure, there is some guilt in there and most of us have lessons to learn. But if guilt were the whole problem, the wound wouldn't be that hard to heal. Because we all know how to heal guilt. We've known since kindergarten: Whatever wrong thing you did, you stop doing it, you confess, you do penance, and then you seek forgiveness -- preferably from the person you wronged, but if that's not possible, from God or from your own conscience.<br /><br />But that process doesn’t work here. It fails at the first step, because no matter how much you learn and grow, the real evil isn’t something you can stop. Whether you like it or not, the system of privilege is going to keep channeling benefits to you. Repentance and forgiveness isn’t going to change that underlying situation. And if forgiveness won’t heal you, that should give you a clue that what you’re feeling isn’t really guilt.<br /><br />But then, what is it? I believe it's actually shame.<br /><br /><b>How shame heals. </b>Guilt is feeling bad about what you <i>did</i>. Shame is feeling bad about what you <i>are</i>. It’s a wound in your identity, like believing that you are ugly or stupid or disgusting. You can’t be forgiven for something like that, but you can be accepted and you can learn to accept yourself. That’s how shame gets healed: not by forgiveness but by acceptance.<br /><br />So what's wrong with what I am that I should feel bad about it? It's not that I'm white. It's not that I'm male or American or straight or successful. None of that is anything to be ashamed of. But what I am ashamed of and I ought to be ashamed of is that <i>I am a beneficiary of injustice</i>. I say that I love justice, but <i>injustice </i>loves<i> me</i>. And that creates a dissonance that ripples through my whole identity. Deep down, which side am I on?<br /><br />If shame is healed by acceptance, what exactly should I be trying to accept? I don’t want to accept injustice. I don’t want to say, “People suffer for my benefit, but I’m OK with that.” Clearly something about me has to change before acceptance can work its healing magic. But what?<br /><br />Two things. First, I need to bring the spark back to my relationship with justice. No amount of guilt-ridden penance can do that. Instead, I need to find the positive love of justice inside myself, and I need to nurture it until it grows and flowers into action organically. I need to develop my compassion, expand my vision of a better world, and nurture my hope until I find myself working towards that better world, not as penance, not counting the hours and wondering when my sentence will be up, but just because I can.<br /><br />And second, I need to make a change in my self-image so that the benefits of injustice stay outside my identity. This is what Peggy McIntosh is doing with her bank account metaphor. She pictures the benefits of white privilege not as part of who she is, but as something outside herself: a bank account where unearned benefits keep piling up whether she wants them or not.<br /><br />Now, that image may be easy to picture, but to really internalize it requires humility. Because separating my identity from my privilege also means separating my ego from my accomplishments. It means recognizing that yes, I have some talents, and yes I have worked hard to do what I've done and get where I am. But I also had an extra push. When I came the plate, the wind was blowing out. So yes, I swung the bat and yes I made contact, but I don't get to take full credit for where the ball landed.<br /><br />But if I can accept that diminishment of my ego, then my personal responsibility for injustice doesn't begin until I spend those unearned benefits. Am I going to spend the bank account of privilege on myself? Or will I be a steward and manage it for the cause of justice?<br /><br />More specifically: If privilege has made my life smoother, if it has made me richer, freer, more powerful, and more influential than I otherwise would have been; if it has given me a podium and a microphone so that my voice is heard; or if my face, for no good reason, is one that police are reluctant to swing a billy club at -- what should I do with those advantages?<br /><br />If I claim them as mine and use them solely for my own benefit, then I am taking the injustice back into my identity. But if I can manage that metaphorical bank account for the greater good, then the benefits of injustice stay outside my identity, and I can accept my self-image as a white male American without accepting racism, sexism, or American hegemony.<br /><br /><b>Getting started. </b>Now, this kind of change in self-image is hard, and I don't claim to have perfectly implemented it yet. But in case you want to try it yourself, I want to leave you with a simple suggestion on how to get started: Find some small privilege that you already think about this way.<br /><br />For me, it's height. I'm six foot one, which is tall enough to gain significant advantages in a world of high shelves and obstacles that are hard to see over. And yet, I don't think I have ever felt guilt or shame about being tall.<br /><br />Maybe that's because I was brought up to think of height as a community asset. And so, if you're having trouble getting your bag into the overhead compartment, I'll help you. If you ask me to get you something you can't reach at the supermarket, I'll do it. And I won't be judging whether you deserve my help, or thinking, "These damn short people, always trying to get something for nothing. Why are they my problem?"<br /><br />Short people's problems are my problems because height is a community asset. I have it, so I use it for the common good.<br /><br />Probably there is some similar privilege in your life, some advantage that you routinely offer to others without thinking twice. And I'll bet it never occurs to you to feel bad about having that privilege.<br /><br />What if you could treat all your privileges that way? As assets to be used for the common good? If you could do that, then no matter how many privileged groups you belong to, the wound in your identity would be healed. Not painfully, through guilt and penance, but joyfully, through compassion and love and generosity.<br /><br />And that message of joy and healing is the good news of social justice. http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2014/03/recovery-from-privilege.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-1093000406658931823Wed, 12 Mar 2014 14:36:00 +00002014-03-12T10:59:58.777-04:00Gay Rights Shows the Problem With Traditional Religion<p>Anybody who has been following my writings knows that while I <a href="http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2012/05/humanist-approach-to-death.html">take a humanistic approach to most topics</a>, I’ve consistently been <a href="http://uuworld.org/ideas/articles/5716.shtml">critical of the New Atheists</a> and their root-and-branch rejection of religion. I recognize that (with certain exceptions) many people’s religions make them happier, more compassionate people; and if they are, I don’t see how anyone would gain by convincing them otherwise. My parents were such people, and <a href="http://uuworld.org/spirit/articles/192143.shtml">as they declined towards death</a> I was perfectly content to let them believe they would soon be in Heaven.</p><p>But there is one point on which I agree with the Richard Dawkins/Christopher Hitchens view: It’s dangerous to make a place in your mind for divine decrees that are not to be questioned. If a mistake makes it into that citadel at the center of your worldview, it becomes immune to the ordinary processes of correction.</p><p>For example, if it somehow it got into the secular part of your mind that 2 + 2 = 5, you’d eventually catch on. You’d make mistakes, screw things up, and after you’d seen enough of those errors, you’d recognize what they all had in common. “Maybe 2 + 2 isn’t 5,” you’d say. “I need to take another look at that."</p><p>But now imagine that such an error made it into your divine-decree citadel: "God said: 'Two plus two equals five.' The heresy that 2 + 2 = 4 is a construction of the Devil, designed to drag us down to Hell."</p><p>Now you would screw up the same things that a similarly mistaken secularist would, but you wouldn’t learn from your mistakes. Every time the thought surfaced that the problem was in your arithmetic, you’d say, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” You’d look for something or somebody else you could blame for those screw-ups, and you’d keep making them.</p><p>If you want to see this process in action, look at gay rights.</p><p>A couple generations ago, the conventional wisdom said that homosexuality corrupted society, and so society was justified in punishing homosexual acts and refusing to recognize homosexual relationships. Just about everybody believed that — or at least they seemed to in public — and so it was hard to think otherwise. There was a circularity to it, as there often is when an idea isn’t seriously challenged: Gays stayed in the closet, most straights believed they didn’t know any gays, and so the idea that society could tolerate gays without being damaged mostly went untested.</p><p>But over the last few decades, gays and lesbians have been increasingly more visible, more recognized, and more tolerated. As a result, we now have evidence to look at. Overwhelmingly, that evidence shows that there are no ill effects to tolerating homosexuality and homosexual relationships. Again and again, the falling-sky predictions of traditionalists have not come true. Boston, for example, has allowed same-sex marriages since 2003. So by now the resulting social breakdown really ought to be showing up in statistical comparisons to Bible-belt cities like Houston or Atlanta. It doesn’t seem to be.</p><p>Straights who know same-sex couples are seeing the same thing anecdotally: It looks a little weird at first and your early interactions may be a bit clumsy, but before long you start to wonder why you ever thought something had to go wrong. </p><p>As a result, by now just about everybody who held their homosexuality-corrupts-society belief in a secular way has looked at the evidence and abandoned it. It just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. And without that belief, there’s really no secular justification for punishing homosexual acts or refusing to recognize same-sex relationships.</p><p>But people who are anti-gay because God-says-it’s-wrong have not changed their views. Instead, their predictions of societal doom and divine judgment keep stretching further and further into the future and getting more and more bizarre. <a href="http://www.advocate.com/politics/2012/10/31/10-disasters-gays-were-blamed-causing?page=full">Anything that goes wrong</a> — from <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=121322">9-11</a> to Hurricanes <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2008/04/23/22152/hagee-katrina-mccain/">Katrina</a> and <a href="http://defendproclaimthefaith.org/blog/?p=2976">Sandy</a> — somehow connects to gay rights. The more evidence piles up against their views, the more shrill and strident they become.</p><p>How long can this go on? Well, if the struggle to deny evolution is anything to judge by, centuries. Once a mistake gets into the God-says-so citadel, it’s very hard to get it out.</p><p>And that’s got to make you wonder if you should have such a citadel at all.</p>http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2014/03/gay-rights-shows-problem-with.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-6051879358986925024Thu, 28 Nov 2013 13:08:00 +00002013-11-28T08:08:58.325-05:00Laborem Exercens: the liberal legacy of Pope John Paul II<div style="text-align: center;"><i>Recently I was telling a friend about <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/04/10/105773/-Laborem-Exercens-The-Liberal-Legacy-of-John-Paul-II" target="_blank">a post I wrote on Daily Kos several years ago</a>, and I noticed that software changes over the years had wrecked the formatting, so that it was now hard to read. Worse, the system wouldn't let me fix it. So I'm reposting it here.</i></div><br /><div id="intro" style="background-color: white; color: #242424; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Last week, as I watched conservative politicians and pundits try to wrap themselves in the mantle of the late pope, I found myself wondering how many of them had read his 1981 encyclical&nbsp;<a href="http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens_en.html" style="color: #7c470c; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Laborem Exercens</i></a>.<br /><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">Here's why: If you believe religion is mainly about sex and gender, Pope John Paul II was a conservative. He opposed not only abortion, but contraception as well. He wouldn't allow women to be ordained as priests. But&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Laborem Exercens</i>&nbsp;is about the moral foundations of economics, and it reveals a very different pope - a radically liberal one.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">I'm not inclined to surrender anything to the religious right without a struggle, and that includes Pope John Paul II. He left behind a significant liberal legacy, and I refuse to let the conservative media bury it.<br /><b style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br /></b><b style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Asking the Social Question</b></div></div><div class="article-body" id="body" style="background-color: white; color: #242424; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; margin: 15px 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px;"><i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Laborem Exercens</i>&nbsp;(my high school Latin is rusty, but I translate the title to mean&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Working</i>) revisits "the social question," which Pope Leo XIII had raised 90 years before in the encyclical&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Rerum Novarum</i>&nbsp;(literally&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Of New Things</i>). Pope Leo was responding simultaneously to the excesses of 19th century capitalism and the rising spectres of anarchism, socialism, and communism. John Paul's encyclical updated this thinking to the age of Reagan and Brezhnev.<br /><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">Fittingly for a spiritual leader (and unlike many Democratic politicians), John Paul did not produce a litany of small policy proposals. Instead,&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Laborem Exercens</i>&nbsp;re-examined the most basic assumptions of our economic system - assumptions we usually take for granted. The Pope rejected the commoditization of labor, denounced the separation of capital from labor, and even challenged the basis of the property system itself.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"><b style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Subjective Dimension of Work</b><br /><i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Laborem Exercens</i>' primary distinction is between the&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">objective</i>&nbsp;dimension of work (in which the focus is on the goods being produced, and the worker is merely one of the many factors of production) and its&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">subjective</i>&nbsp;dimension (as one of the fundamental experiences of human life). The importance of this subjective dimension is, in my view, the encyclical's main theme.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"></div><div class="blockquote" style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote class="tr_bq">[H]uman work has an ethical value of its own, which clearly and directly remains linked to the fact that the one who carries it out is a person, a conscious and free subject ... The sources of the dignity of work are to be sought primarily in the subjective dimension, not in the objective one. [endnote 1]</blockquote></div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"><b style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Economism</b><br />The economy, in other words, exists for the sake of people, not people for the sake the economy. Failure to understand this point is an error the Pope called&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">economism</i>.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"></div><div class="blockquote" style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote class="tr_bq">In the modern period, from the beginning of the industrial age, the Christian truth about work had to oppose the various trends of <i>materialistic</i> and <i>economistic</i> thought.</blockquote><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"><blockquote class="tr_bq">For certain supporters of such ideas, work was understood and treated as a sort of "merchandise" that the worker - especially the industrial worker - sells to the employer ... [T]he danger of treating work as a special kind of "merchandise" ... always exists, especially when the whole way of looking at the question of economics is marked by the premises of materialistic economism.</blockquote></div></div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">If we look at the economy from a purely objective and economistic perspective, we see that the development of technology since the Industrial Revolution has made possible an astronomical increase in production. And so we might think that&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">tools</i>&nbsp;are the primary factor of production, and the workers who wield the tools of secondary importance. We might even put natural resources (like oil or metals) in the second place, and rank workers third or even lower. Consequently, we might award the bulk of production to the owners of the tools and the natural resources, rather than to the workers.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">Today, this view often passes for common sense - if it is noticed at all. The Pope not only rejected this assumption, but questioned the whole validity of separating and comparing capital and labor.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"></div><div class="blockquote" style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote class="tr_bq">We must emphasize and give prominence to the primacy of man in the production process,&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">the primacy of man over things</i>. Everything contained in the concept of capital in the strict sense is only a collection of things. Man, as the subject of work, and independently of the work that he does - man alone is a person. This truth has important and decisive consequences.<span style="line-height: 1.4;">&nbsp;</span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">In the light of the above truth we see clearly, first of all, that capital cannot be separated from labour; in no way can labour be opposed to capital or capital to labour, and still less can the actual people behind these concepts be opposed to each other, as will be explained later. A labour system can be right, in the sense of being in conformity with the very essence of the issue, and in the sense of being intrinsically true and also morally legitimate, if in its very basis&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">it overcomes the opposition between labour and capital</i>&nbsp;through an effort at being shaped in accordance with the principle put forward above: the principle of the substantial and real priority of labour.</blockquote></div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"><b style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Two Inheritances</b><br />So what, in the Pope's view, happened to those other two factors of production: tools and natural resources?</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"></div><div class="blockquote" style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="line-height: 1.4;">Working at any workbench, whether a relatively primitive or an ultramodern one, a man can easily see that&nbsp;</span><i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">through his work he enters into two inheritances</i><span style="line-height: 1.4;">: the inheritance of what is given to the whole of humanity in the resources of nature, and the inheritance of what others have already developed on the basis of those resources, primarily by developing technology, that is to say, by producing a whole collection of increasingly perfect instruments for work.</span></blockquote></div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">This is a very radical statement: The natural world and the human civilization built on top of it are the common inheritance of humankind, not the sole possession of those who hold deeds and patents. Contrast this with an equally radical opposing view - an excerpt from John Galt's speech in Ayn Rand's novel&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Atlas Shrugged</i>:</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"></div><div class="blockquote" style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="line-height: 1.4;">The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics' Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.</span></blockquote></div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">In Rand's view, only the capitalist is the heir to the technical advances of prior generations. The worker has been disinherited, except for his opportunity to receive a "gift" from his employer. But the Pope views the worker as an equal inheritor to the capitalist, not only of the work of previous generations, but of the Earth itself.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"><b style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Property</b><br />But if the Earth is the common inheritance of everyone, doesn't that bring the whole property system into question? The Pope was well aware of this implication.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">In London, not far from one of the many sites that can claim to be the birthplace of modern capitalism, stands the Royal Exchange. Carved above its entrance is the first verse of Psalm 24: "The Earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof." Generations of traders have bought and sold the produce of the World under this ironic motto, but John Paul took it seriously.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"></div><div class="blockquote" style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="line-height: 1.4;">Christian tradition has never upheld this right [to own property] as absolute and untouchable. On the contrary, it has always understood this right within the broader context of the right common to all to use the goods of the whole of creation:&nbsp;</span><i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">the right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use</i><span style="line-height: 1.4;">, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone.</span></blockquote></div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">God, in other words, did not create the World solely for the benefit of those who currently hold title to it.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"></div><div class="blockquote" style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="line-height: 1.4;">[T]he position of "rigid" capitalism continues to remain unacceptable, namely the position that defends the exclusive right to private ownership of the means of production as an untouchable "dogma" of economic life. The principle of respect for work demands that this right should undergo a constructive revision, both in theory and in practice.</span></blockquote></div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"><b style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Marxism</b><br />Conservatives are probably wondering at this point whether the Church learned anything at all from the 20th century. John Paul's native Poland, after all, was still under the Soviet thumb when&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Laborem Exercens</i>&nbsp;was published. And yet in these quotes John Paul himself sounds suspiciously like a Marxist from the era of Leo XIII.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">Clearly the Pope was conscious of this potential criticism, and went to some length to distance himself from Marxism as well as capitalism. Marx may have sided with the workers against the capitalists, but in objectivizing work and setting labor against capital he repeated the error of economism.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"></div><div class="blockquote" style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="line-height: 1.4;">In dialectical materialism too man is not first and foremost the subject of work and the efficient cause of the production process, but continues to be understood and treated, in dependence on what is material, as a kind of "resultant" of the economic or production relations prevailing at a given period.</span></blockquote></div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">John Paul also had learned the same lesson that George Orwell put into&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Animal Farm</i>, that bureaucrats can have all the vices of owners.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"></div><div class="blockquote" style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="line-height: 1.4;">[The Church's teaching on ownership] <i>diverges</i> radically from the programme of <i>collectivism</i> as proclaimed by Marxism and put into practice in various countries in the decades following the time of Leo XIII's Encyclical. ... [M]any deeply desired reforms cannot be achieved by an <i>a priori</i> elimination of private ownership of the means of production.</span></blockquote></div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">Taking the means of production away from the capitalists and giving it to the commissars, he recognized, does not solve the problem.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"></div><div class="blockquote" style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="line-height: 1.4;">This group in authority may carry out its task satisfactorily from the point of view of the priority of labour; but it may also carry it out badly by claiming for itself a monopoly of the administration and disposal of the means of production and not refraining even from offending basic human rights. Thus, merely converting the means of production into State property in the collectivist system is by no means equivalent to "socializing" that property.</span></blockquote></div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"><b style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Property Subordinated</b><br />So if the Pope was not proposing collectivization, and yet he held the private property system suspect, where was he going? The previous quote continues:</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"></div><div class="blockquote" style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="line-height: 1.4;">We can speak of socializing only when the subject character of society is ensured, that is to say, when on the basis of his work each person is fully entitled to consider himself a part-owner of the great workbench at which he is working with every one else.</span></blockquote></div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">The workbench image seems key to the Pope's thinking, key to understanding why the opposition of capital and labor must be a mistake. For how can the tools on the workbench (i.e., capital) be&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">against</i>&nbsp;the worker?</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"></div><div class="blockquote" style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="line-height: 1.4;">[I]n the Church's teaching, ownership has never been understood in a way that could constitute grounds for social conflict in labour. As mentioned above, property is acquired first of all through work in order that it may serve work. This concerns in a special way ownership of the means of production. Isolating these means as a separate property in order to set it up in the form of "capital" in opposition to "labour" - and even to practice exploitation of labour - is contrary to the very nature of these means and their possession. They cannot be&nbsp;</span><i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">possessed against labour</i><span style="line-height: 1.4;">, they cannot even be possessed for possession's sake, because the only legitimate title to their possession - whether in the form of private ownership or in the form of public or collective ownership - is that&nbsp;</span><i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">they should serve labour</i><span style="line-height: 1.4;">, and thus, by serving labour, that they should make possible the achievement of the first principle of this order, namely, the universal destination of goods and the right to common use of them.</span></blockquote></div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">Within this worldview, private property may still play an instrumental role. Private property is not a moral right, or part of the natural law, but it may (in certain circumstances) be the best social device we can come up with. In particular, a private property system can address the problem of worker alienation by allowing the worker to own some or all of his produce.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"></div><div class="blockquote" style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="line-height: 1.4;">[T]he person who works desires not only due remuneration for his work; he also wishes that, within the production process, provision be made for him to be able to know that in his work, even on something that is owned in common, he is working "for himself". This awareness is extinguished within him in a system of excessive bureaucratic centralization, which makes the worker feel that he is just a cog in a huge machine moved from above, that he is for more reasons than one a mere production instrument rather than a true subject of work with an initiative of his own. The Church's teaching has always expressed the strong and deep conviction that man's work concerns not only the economy but also, and especially, personal values. The economic system itself and the production process benefit precisely when these personal values are fully respected. In the mind of Saint Thomas Aquinas, this is the principal reason in favour of private ownership of the means of production. ... If it is to be rational and fruitful, any socialization of the means of production must take this argument into consideration.</span></blockquote></div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"><b style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">An Image and a Challenge</b><br />John Paul did not bring&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Laborem Exercens</i>&nbsp;to an exciting climax with a clarion call to action and a catchy slogan for a 30-second campaign ad. He apparently did not feel the need for such an ending, but I find that I do. Unlike, however, many of the pundits I saw on television during the nine days of mourning, I am unwilling to put my words into the mouth of a dead religious leader. And so in this section, though I write under the inspiration of&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Laborem Exercens</i>, I write for myself.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">Eventually, the Pope did manage to say a few nice things about international law, unions, workers' rights, and worker-ownership plans, but I am left with the impression that John Paul saw macro-economics as an unsolved problem. What stands out in&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Laborem Exercens</i>, for me at least, is not any particular system or doctrine or policy, but an image and a challenge.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"><i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Great Workbench.</i>&nbsp;The image is the Great Workbench, where all the work of humanity is done. The Great Workbench always has space for one more, and there's always something that needs doing. Tools are waiting there to be used, and they belong to whomever can wield them. You &nbsp;are not chained to the Great Workbench, but you can take pride in the work you do there and claim some part of it for your own.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">John Paul's message, as I receive it, isn't that any particular human Ism will give us the Great Workbench - not capitalism, not socialism, and certainly not communism. It is, instead, a standard by which all the Isms should be judged and found wanting. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">And that, in this age of triumphant capitalism, is a message worth repeating. The Market, no less that the Politburo, is a fallible human institution. Its makings and its judgments should never be taken for granted, and never exempted from criticism.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"><i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Justifying property.</i>&nbsp;The challenge is to justify the property system - not just the who-owns-what of it, but also the why-anybody-owns-anything. As property owners - and even the poorest of us owns something - we stand between our fellow humans and their divine inheritance. We stand, in essence, between the Creator and his other creatures. How do we justify that position? Do we stand as mediators that transmit divine grace, or as idols that block it? [2]</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">To challenge the property system, as John Paul did, is not to deny that it can be justified. Capitalism and private property have won out over rival systems for good reasons, as the experience of the Pope's native Poland undoubtedly made him well aware. But we can't justify the economic system in one way, and then use it in another.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">If, for example, we believe (as at some level I do) that the capitalist system in the long run can provide everyone with the opportunity for a better life than they could have under any rival system, then we must carry that promise with us and judge ourselves by it. We cannot justify our appropriation of humanity's inheritance in this manner, and then treat the world's crushing poverty and hopelessness as mere collateral damage. It indicts us. It strikes to the heart of our self-justification.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"><b style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Papal Legacy.</b><br />This image and this challenge are themselves part of our second inheritance - the one we receive from those who have gone before. In his time at the Great Workbench, Pope John Paul II did more than etch a few conservative thoughts about sex and gender. He left a liberal economic legacy as well. We need to preserve that legacy, and make sure that it isn't forgotten.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;"><hr />[1] All quotations are from&nbsp;<a href="http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens_en.html" style="color: #7c470c; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">the Vatican's own translation</a></div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">The Pope tended to write sentences of unwieldy length which refer to each other in ways that make them hard to quote concisely - &nbsp;hence my apparently excessive use of ellipses and bracketing. He also over-used italics. All italics in the quotes are original: I have added none, but I have taken out some of the more distracting ones. In wielding these editorial tools, I have done my best to remain faithful to the spirit of the text, and not to take John Paul's words out of their proper context. The reader is invited (and even urged) to check up on me by reading the encyclical end-to-end.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">[2] Christian theology describes two ways of standing between God and humanity - one good, one bad. The good way is to be a mediator. A venerated icon, for example, can mediate meditation and worship. By standing between humanity and God, it makes the presence of God easier to imagine. The bad way is to become an idol, as the icon does when it stops&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">pointing to&nbsp;</i>God and starts&nbsp;<i style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">replacing</i>&nbsp;God.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">Property owners can, and sometimes do, mediate by caring for their property and developing its best use. But they can also be idols - walls that block the flow of divine grace. The property system itself can be an idol. We can worship it and serve its needs, regardless of whether it serves any purpose beyond itself.</div><div style="line-height: 1.4; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding: 0px;">One translation of the name of the old-testament idol Baal is "the Owner." We can, through the property system, worship this aspect of Baal and set ourselves up as little Baals. Or not.</div></div>http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2013/11/laborem-exercens-liberal-legacy-of-pope.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-9103312025247314749Tue, 15 Oct 2013 18:31:00 +00002013-10-15T14:31:55.657-04:00Remembering UUs-L<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;">I just heard from Lance Brown that the UUs-L mailing list is shutting down. It brought back a lot of memories.</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px; font-family: Helvetica;"><br /></span></div>There was a time in the early 1990s when UUs-L was absolutely the place to be. In the days before blogs and social media, it was the best way in the world to stay connected with thoughtful UUs around the country, plus a few overseas.<br /><br />Like a lot of people, I posted something to UUs-L several times a week, sometimes starting a discussion, sometimes commenting on what other people said. The instant feedback taught me a lot about writing; if I said something clumsily, people would misunderstand me and we'd be off on some ridiculous argument that would never have happened if I'd just been clearer. That daily back-and-forth taught me how to write not just to make sense to myself, but to make sense to other people.<br /><br />Sometimes I'd brood over somebody else's post, sit down to flame them, and then realize they hadn't really said what I'd been brooding over. So I learned to read better and listen better.<br /><br />The reason I write for UU World today is that Chris Walton and I met on UUs-L. Otherwise the idea would never have occurred to me.<br /><br />So thanks to everybody who was involved in UUs-L over the years, especially Lance, who kept it going. Times change, technologies evolve, and eventually we all move on one way or another. But that doesn't undo the significance of what we all did together.</span><br />http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2013/10/remembering-uus-l.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-1650330803941361995Tue, 21 May 2013 15:10:00 +00002013-05-21T17:10:09.419-04:00An Imperfect Introduction to Unitarian UniversalismThere's a long story (that you don't really need to know) about how this came to be, but suffice it to say that a draft of a book I once titled <i>Unitarian Universalism 101</i>&nbsp;(I'm not sure what got into me) has been sitting on my hard drive since 2008, waiting for me to rewrite it the way it really ought to be.<br /><br />The problem is that my new ideas for rewrites run faster than my actual writing, so I get continually further and further away from finishing my ideal intro-to-UU book. I have lots of "improved" chapters and other fragments in other folders on my hard drive, but 2008 is the last complete draft that has some kind of internal consistency.<br /><br />In the meantime, friends have found out about the existence of this draft, and one of them talked me into letting my congregation's Coming of Age classes use it for the last two years. They seem to like it.<br /><br />And that has made me realize how silly I'm being with my dreams of perfection. This morning I fixed some simple things (like making the page numbers in the Table of Contents match reality) and uploaded a PDF to the web.<br /><br />It's <a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BylJRzccW3NiUWNnWXhndVRNSHc/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">here</a>. Also <a href="http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/6315702/uu101-2013release-pdf-566k" target="_blank">here</a>. Look at it. Use it in classes if you want. Show it to that cousin who thinks you've joined a cult. Denounce it on your blog if that seems appropriate. If you find mistakes, or just think you've got a better way to explain something, post a comment here. Who knows? If I ever finish another complete draft, maybe I'll do it your way.<br /><br /><br />http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2013/05/an-imperfect-introduction-to-unitarian.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-6059331522862349567Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:10:00 +00002013-04-23T16:10:52.452-04:00The Web of Privilege<br /><div class="p1" style="text-align: center;"><i>a talk given at the annual men's dinner at First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Ann Arbor, Michigan on March 30, 2013</i></div><div class="p1"><b><br /></b></div><div class="p2">As Pat mentioned in my introduction, I'm a writer, which means that I work with words. Words, to me, are like nails and two-by-fours are to a carpenter. They're my tools, what I build things with.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Now, I don't know whether carpenters dream about creating new tools, but I know that writers love to coin words. It's a power fantasy, really, and it goes like this: I'm going to notice something that people should think about more and talk about more, but they don't because it doesn't have a name. So I'm going to come up with a nice catchy word or phrase for it. I'll start using that term and other people will hear it and they'll say, "Wow, I've never had a name for that before." And they'll start using it and thinking about it and telling other people about it. And in some small way the world will be different.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">When I was a kid, somebody invented a new use for the word <i>environmentalist</i>. Before that, an environmentalist had been like a behavioralist, somebody who thought that your social environment determined what kind of person you became. But somewhere around 1970, <i>environmentalist </i>started to mean somebody who cares about the natural systems that support life, and wants to keep Nature from being bulldozed by Civilization.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Now, this wasn't a new idea. From civilization's earliest days there must have been people who felt that way. But since there wasn't a good name for them, a lot of those people probably just thought they were quirky.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Suddenly, though, they became <i>environmentalists</i>, part of a worldwide movement of environmentalists. And people who had never thought about it much before began asking themselves "Should I be an environmentalist?"</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Coining a new word or usage like that is a tremendous fantasy if you're a writer, right up there with seeing your name on the best seller list or having Oprah interview you about your new book: You're going to coin a new term, and it's going to catch on and change the way people think.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Every now and then I indulge that fantasy and invent some new word or phrase. It's a little like buying a lottery ticket, because usually nothing comes of it. I'll invent a term and blog about it, and maybe a few hundred people will see it -- a few thousand if I'm really lucky. A handful will comment about how apt or useful it is. But after a week or two that little ripple has dissipated and nothing has changed.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p3"><br /></div><div class="p2">A couple years ago I came up with something I really thought deserved to catch on, and I push it again every April when people are doing their taxes. The phrase is <i><a href="http://weeklysift.com/2011/10/24/eliminate-the-work-penalty/" target="_blank">work penalty</a>*</i>. Your <i>work penalty </i>is the extra income tax you pay because you get your money by working rather than by collecting dividends or capital gains.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Now, lots of people know at some level that the tax code works that way. Suppose, say, that you're a single guy with $40,000 of taxable income. If that money comes from dividends and capital gains, you're going to owe Uncle Sam $6,000. But if that $40,000 comes from having a job and making wages, you're going to pay the same $6,000, plus $36 more.**&nbsp;</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">So that $36 is your <i>work penalty</i>, an extra little fine that the government imposes because you have a job. (And I'm not even talking about Social Security and Medicare taxes here, which would make the difference even bigger. Even if you restrict yourself to talking about income tax, there's a work penalty.)&nbsp;</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Maybe $36 doesn't sound like much, but it gets bigger the more you make. Suppose our two single guys start doing better and make $100,000. Now the man of leisure pays $15,000, while the man with a job pays that same $15,000, plus a work penalty of six and a half thousand more.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">The tax people call this a "preferred rate" for dividend and capital gain income. But I just don't think that captures the full outrageousness of the situation. If you work, you pay more tax than somebody who makes the same amount of money without working. There's a work penalty.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">I had real hopes that would catch on, but so far it hasn't. I'm going to <a href="http://weeklysift.com/2013/04/15/how-big-was-your-work-penalty-in-2012/" target="_blank">blog about it again on April 15</a>, but it's a long shot, like the lottery.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p3"><br /></div><div class="p2">Last summer, though, I wrote a piece called "<a href="http://weeklysift.com/2012/09/10/the-distress-of-the-privileged/" target="_blank">The Distress of the Privileged</a>" and got closer than I've ever gotten before. The term I coined there was <i>privileged distress</i>. Privileged distress is that sense of persecution you feel when you start to lose an unfair advantage that you have always taken for granted. You're still getting an unfair advantage, but it's just not as big as it used to be, so you feel persecuted.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">An example helps bring the idea home. Think about that girl in high school who just looked perfect. You know the one I'm talking about. She had the face and the hair and the skin and the figure, and it all came together flawlessly. So imagine one morning she goes to the mirror and sees a bright red pimple right in the middle of her cheek.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">What goes through her mind? "That is so unfair. Why does God hate me?"</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Now, objectively, her hardship is that for the next week or two she's only going to look perfect <i>from certain angles</i>, while the rest of us don't look perfect from any angle. But that's not how it feels. It feels like, "What does God hate me?"</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">That's privileged distress. It's a real feeling. She's not making it up. Being slightly less beautiful for a few days really does feel like a persecution.</div><div class="p3"><br /></div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">I invented that term for a reason. I was blogging about the Chick-fil-A boycott. I don't know if you remember, but it started when Dan Cathy, the second-generation CEO of Chick-fil-A, went on Christian talk radio and <a href="http://www.glaad.org/news/chick-fil-president-dan-cathy-says-we-are-inviting-gods-judgment-our-nation-letting-gays-marry">said some annoying things about people who support same-sex marriage</a> -- that we're "prideful" and "arrogant" and we're "inviting God's judgment" on America.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">That caused people to look at him a little closer, and it turns out that Dan Cathy is a very generous guy. Over the years he has <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/07/26/589841/memo-to-the-media-and-the-ambivalent-chick-fil-a-condemns-discriminates-and-campaigns-against-lgbt-people/">given millions of dollars</a> to what he would call "pro-family groups" but that other people might call "anti-gay hate groups".</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">So there was a backlash and a boycott and a lot of bad publicity for Chick-fil-A. The conservative Christians who identify with Dan Cathy were shocked. Mike Huckabee called the criticism of Cathy -- not the criticism he dished out, but the criticism he received -- "<a href="http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/huckabee-chick-fil-a-smeared-by-vicious-hate-speech-and-intolerant-bigotry/politics/2012/07/23/44297">vicious hate speech and intolerant bigotry</a>".</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">To grasp why they were shocked, you need to understand that some people have a bigger Bill of Rights than the rest of us. We're talking about fast food, so let's call it "super-sized". My freedom of speech, for example, means that the government can't put me in jail just because I say something controversial. If the doors burst open and federal agents haul me away because I express the wrong opinions, that would violate my freedom of speech.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Similarly, freedom of religion, for most of us, means that the government can't treat us badly because it doesn't like our faith. So, it's fine (constitutionally, at least) to put a work penalty in the tax code, but if there were a UU penalty -- some higher tax rate that only applied to us -- that would violate our freedom of religion.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">But the super-sized rights go way beyond that. If you have super-sized freedom of speech and super-sized freedom of religion, then at any time in any place you should be able to blurt out any opinion you have. And no matter how bigoted or stupid or crazy it is, everybody else should just let it pass. There should be no blow-back, no consequences.&nbsp;</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">As I say, most of us don't have that. When you write a letter to editor, say, you have to think about what will happen if it gets published. How will your neighbors react, or your co-workers, or your boss, or your customers? If you're writing as an atheist or Muslim or some other unpopular faith, it would never occur to you that everybody would let it slide. Or if you admit that you're gay or polyamorous or transgendered -- of course you think about the possible consequences.&nbsp;</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">But Dan Cathy isn't like everybody else. He's a CEO who's the son of a CEO. He's not just Christian and straight, he's also white and male and rich. He's grown up with that super-sized Bill of Rights, and then suddenly one day he's treated just a little bit like the rest of us; people listen to what he says and they don't let it pass, some of them take offense, and some of them decide that they don't want to deal with this guy and they don't want their lunch money going off to support some hate group. And to Dan Cathy, that feels like persecution. It also felt like persecution to Sarah Palin, who complained that the Chick-fil-A boycott had "<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/01/sarah-palin-chick-fil-a-boycott_n_1727965.html">a chilling effect on our First Amendment rights</a>."</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">And while that isn't true in any literal sense, it <i>feels </i>true if you think you're supposed to be covered by the super-sized First Amendment, the one that just applies to people who are powerful or express popular views. If you think you're supposed to have that privilege, and then you discover you don't, it can be very distressing.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p3">Once you understand privileged distress, you see it all over the place. Native English-speakers are offended by bilingual signs, because they shouldn't have to be reminded that there are other languages in the world. Rush Limbaugh believes that when people call him a racist or a sexist, that's a bigger injustice than actual racism or sexism. Employers think their religious freedom is threatened when they can't control how their female employees get contraception. Whenever we talk about raising rich people's tax rates back to where they were 15 years ago, they ask why we want to "punish" people for being successful.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">But my personal favorite is the War on Christmas. When Christians aren't allowed to take over the public square for the entire month of December, they feel persecuted. (Because, of course, the town green is totally decked out on Buddha's birthday or Mohammed's birthday. And in the malls in February you can't even hear yourself think for all the Darwin carols.) OK, that's silly. But Christians are used to having an unfair advantage over everybody else, so when that advantage slips just a little bit, it really does feel like oppression, like suddenly everybody hates them.</div><div class="p3"><br /></div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Somewhat to my surprise, <i>privileged distress </i>has started to take off. "The Distress of the Privileged" has been the most popular thing on my blog almost every week since I posted it. Other bloggers have linked to it, people have shared it on Facebook, and by now that post has gotten nearly a quarter of a million hits, almost four times as many as anything else I've ever done.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">One of the reasons I think the term took off was that I didn't just toss it out there for people to use. I went on to consider the tricky question of what to do with privileged people in distress. What do you do with the Dan Cathys or the Rush Limbaughs or that girl from high school?</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">What you want to do, what would really feel satisfying, is to wap them upside the head and say, "Get over yourself. Some people in the world have real problems, and you're not one them."</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">But the more I thought about that, the more it seemed like a bad idea. Privileged distress is a real emotion. As strange as it may look from the outside, the distressed privileged really do feel persecuted. And if you're feeling genuinely persecuted, and then someone waps you upside the head, you don't snap out of it, you feel <i>more </i>persecuted.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">And the really dangerous thing about the privileged feeling persecuted is that they are <i>privileged</i>. Even if their status is starting to slip, they still have rights and powers and resources that the rest of us don't have. If they really get galvinized around their sense of persecution, they've got what it takes to launch a counter-revolution and get their unfair advantages back.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">That's kind of what the Tea Party is. You have white people and straight people and native-born English-speakers and fundamentalist Christians, and they all feel their privileges starting to slip away. Those privileges are far from gone; there's still a considerable advantage to being a white, straight, native-born, English-speaking Christian. But it's not what it used to be, so it feels like persecution. So they get together in rallies and money magically appears from billionaires and corporations and they say, "We need to take our country back."</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">I don't think telling them to get over themselves is going to work.</div><div class="p3"><br /></div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">As soon as I realized the complexity of the problem, I knew I couldn't just focus on Dan Cathy. Because real life is messy. Real people and real situations are never quite as simple and clear-cut as you need them to be to make your point. So I thought back through pop culture, looking for a paradigmic example, a poster boy for privileged distress.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">And I found one.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">The character I have in mind comes from a popular movie of the mid-90s called <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120789/">Pleasantville</a></i>. Maybe you remember it:&nbsp;</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">It's the one where a teen-age brother and sister get hold of a magic remote control and are zapped into a 1950s TV show that is sort of like <i>Ozzie and Harriet </i>or <i>Father Knows Best</i>. Suddenly, they are the son and daughter of the Parkers, a perfect TV family living in the perfect TV town of Pleasantville.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Naturally, their arrival starts to infect Pleasantville with 1990s notions, and soon characters are asking the kinds of questions that never used to come up, like "Do I like my life?" and "Why do things have to be this way?" In particular, Mrs. Parker discovers that being the perfect housewife is not really what she wants out of life, or at least it's not all she wants.&nbsp;</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Her husband can't hear what she's saying or grasp why anything needs to change, and that sets up this scene:</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">George Parker, the father of the perfect TV family, comes home from work. He opens the door, hangs his hat on a hook like he always does, and announces, "Honey, I'm home", expecting his beautiful, smiling wife to come out of the kitchen and his perfect children to bounce down the stairs to greet him, like they always do.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Today, though, the house is dark and silent but for the thunder of a storm outside. And George is slow to catch on. He has said the magic words, but he's still waiting for the rabbit to appear in his hat.&nbsp;</div><div class="p2">So he says them again, "Honey, I'm home." Nothing.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">He wanders through the house, and into the kitchen where nothing is on the table. "Where's my dinner?" he wonders. He looks in the oven, inside the kettles. "Where's my dinner?"&nbsp;</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Uncomprehending, he goes back outside, into the rain, and pleads with this suddenly unsympathetic universe: "Where's my dinner?"</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowFullScreen='true' webkitallowfullscreen='true' mozallowfullscreen='true' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/EZiKAskjPF8?feature=player_embedded' FRAMEBORDER='0' /></div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p3">One of the reasons I like this scene as a paradigm for privileged distress is that George Parker is not a bad guy. At least he never wanted to be a bad guy. He never thought he was a bad guy. He's somebody's image of the perfect Dad. There's no malice in him. No cruelty. Society gave him a role to play, and he played it to the best of his ability. That's how he thought life was supposed to be: I play my role, you play your role, and it all works out.</div><div class="p3"><br /></div><div class="p2">I don't think it ever occurred to him that his role was maybe <i>more </i>pleasant than the&nbsp; other roles in Pleasantville, that maybe other people had to sacrifice more to play their roles than he did to play his. Maybe they didn't used to think much about it either, but now they are and they're starting to change things.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">And poor George. He has no dinner.</div><div class="p3"><br /></div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">In my blog post I consider the question of what should happen to George, and to all the other people suffering from privileged distress. How should the liberalizing forces of the world look at them?</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">And I come to the conclusion that the two obvious ways are wrong. The first wrong way to deal with George is for all the other characters to say, "Poor George. We're so sorry you're feeling distress. We'll get back into our subservient roles and everything will be OK again."</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Because even though privileged distress is real, it just isn't on the same scale as the distress that the other characters are trying to overcome. I'm sure many straight people are genuinely upset by all the advances in gay rights, but gays going back into the closet would suffer at a different order of magnitude. I'm sure many white parents were sincerely frightened and worried when their children's schools were desegregated, but sending black children back to their segregated schools would inflict suffering of a whole other order. There is no going back in this; the unfair advantages have to come down.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">But I also think it's also a bad move to villainize George, at least not until he does something actually villainous. Up until now, he has just been clueless and oblivious to his privileged role.&nbsp; And right now he's feeling hurt and confused. But if he gets villainized, if other characters look on him as a proper object for revenge, if they say, "I'm glad you have no dinner, George. I'm glad you're unhappy" then I think something in him starts to harden. That hurt and confusion can become self-justification and a determination to take his privileged role back.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">What I recommend instead (and I link to an example of a <a href="http://www.owldolatrous.com/?p=288" target="_blank">gay blogger doing his best to stay in this kind of dialog</a> with some of Dan Cathy's fundamentalist defenders), is a balance between firmness and compassion -- a firmness about not going back, not taking up subservient positions again, but also the kind of compassion that does not rejoice in anyone's distress, even the distress of the privileged.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">In any kind of struggle over human rights and dignity, there are going to be a certain number of people who really are villainous, who do have malice, who take pleasure in cruelty, and who enjoy taking unfair advantage of others.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">But I also think that if you look at the people today who are drifting into counter-revolution, at the people who wander past a Tea Party rally and find themselves thinking, "Yeah. That's right!", you'll also find a lot of George Parkers. You'll find a lot of folks who grew up wanting to be good people, and who by the standards of the society they grew up in thought they were good people. And now they feel villainized. They talk the way they've always talked, and now people tell them they're racists. They do the kinds of things they've always done, and now they're sexists, they're homophobes, classists, jingoists; they're some kind of <i>-ist</i> or <i>-phobe</i> they never heard of before, but it sounds bad.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">And they worry that maybe there is no way for them to be good people in this new world that seems so different from the one they were raised in. They hear comedian Bill Maher proclaiming "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Maher-New-Rules/dp/B000FC2HQS">New Rules</a>", and that's exactly what they're afraid of: that people who despise them have acquired the power to make new rules. Because if that's true, then the George Parkers can never be good people in this new world, because someone will constantly be rigging new rules against them, rules that they have been breaking all their lives without knowing what they are.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">And so when the speaker at that rally says, "We need to take our country back" it sounds right. "Yeah. Take our country back."</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">That's why I don't want to try to slap the privileged distress out of them. I think they do need to hear a message of firmness. They do need to hear that the world is not going back, that gays are not going back into the closet, that women are going to be equals in the workplace, that America will soon have a non-white majority, and that we're not just a country of Christians and maybe a few Jews, but also of Muslims and Hindus and pagans and Buddhists and even atheists. They need to hear that message expressed with firmness.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">But I think they also need to hear another message, one that says that they don't have to be villains, that the new game is not rigged against them, that it is still possible for the formerly privileged to be good people by the standards of this newer, fairer world. It will not be easy. They will need to learn to see people who were once invisible to them. They will have to develop sensitivity to kinds of suffering that in the old world were not their problem. It will not be easy, but their own faith and the principles they were brought up to respect call them to make that effort. And if they answer that call, they can succeed. They can once again see themselves and be seen by others as good people.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">I believe that if they get that vision in their heads, then they won't want to jump up and cheer when somebody says, "Take your country back." Instead they'll say: "No. My ancestors came from another world, and sometimes on holidays with drinks in their hands they would dream of going back to a land where things make sense and the people are all like us. But come morning, they wouldn't go back, because there is no going back. We are here now. This is America."</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p3"><br /></div><div class="p2">When I was writing this talk, I thought, "<i>This is America. </i>That would be a good line to end on."</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">But you know, if I stop here, there's a hole in the talk. Maybe you've noticed it: Here I am -- white, male, straight, educated, healthy, able-bodied, American -- and I'm talking about the privileged as if they're <i>out there </i>somewhere.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">I've been talking about what to do with <i>those </i>George Parkers. But what do you do when you look in the mirror and see that you <i>are </i>George Parker?&nbsp;</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">What if you want to be a good person and try to be a good person and maybe even sometimes convince yourself that you are a good person, but other times you notice that all your alleged "goodness" happens inside a system that gives you tremendous unfair advantages, and you have been oblivious to the suffering that the system imposes on other people. You've been tempted into thinking "I play my role, you play your role, and it all works out." But you never payed enough attention to the fact that your role is much easier than some of the roles that have been assigned to others.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">What do you do with that?</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">It's amazing how different a situation looks when you picture yourself on the other side. Words and phrases that seemed totally adequate for describing other people are way too simple when they start applying to you and me.&nbsp; <i>Privilege </i>is a whole different concept when you realize that you are one of the people inside the citadel, trying to decide whether to defend what you have or open the gates. <i>Privileged distress </i>is a whole different concept when you understand that you also worry that your unfair advantages may be going away faster than you are learning to live without them.&nbsp;</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">When the privileged were Dan Cathy and Sarah Palin and the target audience of the Tea Party, I felt so magnanimous when I recommended viewing them with compassion. How generous I was, to visualize a path for their redemption.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">But when it's my redemption we're talking about, that vision doesn't seem quite so generous. In fact, I resent the idea that I have to depend on the magnaminity of others, or that people are doing me a favor when they don't villainize me.&nbsp;</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Concepts that aren't good enough to describe me probably are good enough for me to use on others either. So let's start over from the beginning and see if we need to describe privilege in a new way.</div><div class="p3"><br /></div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">When I am forced to think of myself as privileged, the first thing that bothers me is how binary that judgment is in comparison to the multi-faceted nature of my life. I have many advantages in my life, but also the occasional disadvantage.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">I was in college in the Seventies, during an era of feminist consciousness-raising. So naturally, I was often lectured by female students about my male privilege. And they were right, I did get unfair advantages from being a man. I still do.&nbsp;</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">But I was also part of the first generation in my family to go to college. At times I felt overwhelmed there and out of place, and I often wished there was somebody back home I could call and ask for advice. The daughters of college professors and engineers and lawyers -- they had that and never thought twice about it. So it grated on me how easily they could focus on <i>my </i>unfair advantages and be so oblivious to their own.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">The same pattern occurs on a larger scale. When we picture privilege as a binary thing, like a line in the sand, or a wall between the oppressors and the oppressed, all the various kinds of privilege seem like different walls, and the struggles to tear them down like different struggles, rather than a single struggle for a fairer world.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Throughout history, the real villains, the people who work to make the world less fair rather than more, have taken advantage of that fragmentation, playing off the suffragettes against the abolitionists, the union hardhats against the hippie peaceniks, the churches that mobilized for racial justice against the justice movement for gays and lesbians.&nbsp;</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p3"><br /></div><div class="p2">So if I'm going to apply the notion of privilege to myself, the first revision I want is that we stop thinking of it as a wall that divides, and instead think of it as a web in which we are all embedded and all implicated. Of course some of us have more advantages than others, and I have more than most. But as I look around, I don't see many pure villains or pure victims. All of us get some unfair advantages and all of us suffer some injustices.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">When that much is acknowledged, then I find that I am willing to accept my place in the web, to acknowledge that a disproportionate share of the unfair advantages flow to me, and that most of the changes needed to make the world fairer will work to my personal disadvantage.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">When I think of privilege as a web whose strands of advantage and disadvantage pull in many directions, I feel a stronger sense of solidarity with all the justice movements. Because all the <i>isms</i> -- racism, sexism, classism and so on -- are just the same web of privilege viewed from a different angle.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">When we see our place in the web, advantaged in this way, disadvantaged in that, it becomes clear that it's not enough to campaign for justice for people like ourselves, or even to make restitution for the particular privileges that benefit us. In one particular time and place, one dimension of that web may be especially important, and then everyone who seeks justice needs to come together in solidarity, even if that dimension of the web not usually their issue.</div><div class="p3"><br /></div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Once I accept my place in the web, the next question that matters to me is: What kind of guilt or responsibility should I feel in response to my unfair advantages?</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">The easiest kind of responsibility to assess is outright villainy, when people act out of cruelty or malice or greed. They get unfair advantages over others because they seize those advantages from people who are not powerful enough to stop them.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">That's easy to assess because the guilt is entirely personal, and the traditional messages of personal redemption apply: Go and sin no more. Make restitution. Seek forgiveness.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">But other unfair advantages don't fit that model. I once read that taxis are much less likely to stop for black passengers than for whites. I have never come up with any personal action I can take to remedy that. I don't drive a cab. When I take cabs, it doesn't help anyone if I let the first one go by in solidarity, or if, when I get my unfair advantage of a quick and easy cab, I feel bad about it.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">That's the trap that is sometimes called "white liberal guilt", and it happens whenever you try to take personal responsibility for a systemic injustice whose benefits flow to you through no effort of your own. Personal redemption just doesn't work here. There's no sin you can stop committing, and no individual who can accept your restitution or offer you forgiveness.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">But if you're not going to indulge in white liberal guilt -- or male liberal guilt or straight liberal guilt or any of the other varieties -- what's the alternative? It's a cop-out to say, "It's not me, it's the system" and go merrily on your way.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Instead, I think we need to develop a more effective sense of systemic guilt. The value of personal guilt is that it motivates efforts towards personal redemption. In the same way, systemic guilt should motivate efforts towards systemic redemption.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">But of course, systems don't feel guilt; people do. So it's up to us to make the connection. We need to condition ourselves to notice our unfair advantages, not so that we can wallow in personal guilt that can't lead to any personal acts of redemption, but so that we can bank up a sense of systemic guilt that can motivate us to work to change the system.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">When I'm sitting in the back of my easily-flagged cab, I shouldn't feel bad as a person, but my awareness of that unfair advantage should add fuel to my determination to work against the racism that gave it to me.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Most of us don't have a well-developed and effective sense of systemic guilt yet. But some do, and they're easy to spot. They're the people who don't avert their eyes from injustice, but aren't depressed by it. Quite the opposite, their awareness of injustice and of their own unfair advantages gets them out of bed in the morning and sets them to work.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Systemic guilt isn't an idea that you learn by hearing a speaker or reading a book, it's a sensibility that you pick up by hanging around with people who have it. That's an important reason to participate in a justice-seeking community like a Unitarian Universalist congregation. If you look around, I'm sure you'll be able to identify people who have that effective sense of systemic guilt. Help them do what they do, and you'll probably pick it up.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">And finally, there's George Parker's kind of guilt, where the personal and the systemic overlap. George wasn't a villain, he was just oblivious. The people around him were suffering and he let himself not notice. He didn't create the unjust system. But he accepted the advantages it gave him and didn't think too much about them. And when others began to rebel against those injustices, all he noticed was that he had no dinner.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">When it comes to systemic injustice, ignorance is not a defense. We are all personally responsible for breaking through our obliviousness.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Nothing brings this point home more clearly than a type of privilege we don't talk about very often: American privilege. Even if you are struggling in America, even if you are relatively poor, people all over the world are risking their health and even their lives to bring you cheap products.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Last fall, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Dhaka_fire">over 100 workers died in a factory fire in Bangladesh</a><span id="goog_916141809"></span><span id="goog_916141810"></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/"></a>, partly because there were no outside-the-building fire escapes. Those deaths could easily have been prevented, if the factory hadn't been under so much pressure to keep costs down. It was making clothing for a number of American retailers, including Walmart.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Now, the poor and working-class Americans who shop at Walmart did not mean those Asian workers any harm. They did not demand that Walmart squeeze that last quarter, that last dime, out of the price of its shirts. They did not push that low-cost mandate onto the factory or insist that the factory meet it by cutting corners on safety. In short, they did not kill those workers.&nbsp;</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">But part of the benefit of that systemic evil flowed to them, and they were oblivious to it.&nbsp;</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Nearly all of us are oblivious to the human costs of the products we buy. Our whole retail establishment conspires with our desire to remain oblivious. Each marvelous product seems to appear on the shelf by magic. All that matters is whether you want it and what it costs.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">In reality, though, that product is the result of a process that may stretch around the world, affecting countless people as well as the global environment. When you buy the product, you become part of that process. Your purchase ratifies the decisions that were made all the way up and down the line.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">What kind of guilt does that give you -- personal or systemic? Well, until you make an effort to overcome your obliviousness, you won't know. Maybe you can find a personal path to redemption by buying something else or doing without. Or maybe there is no personal redemption, and whatever choice you make will thrust suffering onto someone. Then you have acquired systemic guilt, and your knowledge of it and your profit from it should motivate you to work for systemic change.</div><div class="p3"><br /></div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">I got here by asking what vision of privilege I would be willing to apply to myself. And I rejected the temptation to view privilege as a wall or a series of walls between villains and victims. Instead, I envisioned privilege as a web in which we are all embedded and all implicated. Unfair advantages flow up and down the strands of that web, and everyone gets some of each.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">But some of us get more advantage than disadvantage, and some of us get a lot more. I think the first responsibility that puts on us is simply to awaken, to shake off our comfortable obliviousness and see just how much suffering is necessary to keep that flow of advantages coming.&nbsp;</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">Next, I think we need to sort out how much of our guilt is personal and how much belongs to an unjust system that channels advantages to us without our asking and sometimes even without our consent. Personal guilt should lead to personal redemption by changing our ways, making restitution, and seeking forgiveness. But systemic guilt defies our attempts at personal redemption; we can only discharge it by working for systemic change.</div><div class="p3"><br /></div><div class="p3"><br /></div><div class="p2">I want to close with the words President Johnson spoke to a joint session of Congress as he was introducing the Voting Rights Act, one of the great achievements of the civil rights movement. He was talking specifically about racism, but I believe that what he had to say applies more widely to all forms of privilege. I love this quote, because it expresses both the universality of injustice and the commitment to take it on.</div><div class="p2"><br /></div><div class="p2">"It is not just Negroes," he said, "but it is really all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome."<br /><br /></div><div class="p3"><br /></div><div class="p2">* When I googled the term later, I discovered that <a href="http://www.andrewtobias.com/newcolumns/050927.html">Andrew Tobias</a> had already thought of it. But no matter, I'd still love to see it catch on.</div><div class="p2">** More yet if you figure in payroll taxes, which I thought was a little bit too much for a talk without visual aides.</div><div class="p3"><br /></div>http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-web-of-privilege.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-4815541603411874906Thu, 20 Dec 2012 14:29:00 +00002012-12-20T09:29:22.070-05:00The Web of Privilege<p><em>presented at First Unitarian Church of Athol, Massachusetts</em><br><em>December 9, 2012</em></p><p ><strong>Opening Words</strong></p><p>"What you believe depends on what you’ve seen, -- not only what is visible, but what you are prepared to look in the face." -- Salman Rushdie</p><p><strong>Meditation</strong></p><p>from Leo Tolstoy's novel <em>Anna Karenina</em>:</p><blockquote><p>Levin had often noticed in arguments between the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, an enormous number of logical subtleties and words, the arguers would finally come to the awareness that what they had spent so long struggling to prove to each other had been known to them long, long before, from the beginning of the argument, but that they loved different things and therefore did not want to name what they loved, so as not to be challenged.</p><p>He had often felt that sometimes during an argument you would understand what your opponent loves, and suddenly come to love the same thing yourself, and agree all at once, and then all reasonings would fall away as superfluous; and sometimes it was the other way round: you would finally say what you yourself love, for the sake of which you are inventing your reasonings, and if you happened to say it well and sincerely, the opponent would suddenly agree and stop arguing.</p></blockquote><p><strong>First Reading</strong></p><p>In <em>Sacred Ground </em>, Eboo Patel quotes Jesse Jackson saying this to a Muslim group in the wake of 9-11: </p><blockquote><p>You have a choice to make right now: You can talk about an America where <em>your </em>people don't get sent to the back of the bus, or you can talk about an America where <em>no one </em>gets sent to the back of the bus.</p></blockquote><p><strong>Second Reading</strong></p><p>Last summer, Wayne Self's <a href="http://www.owldolatrous.com/">Owldolatrous blog</a> suddenly went viral because of a series of posts about the Chick-fil-A boycott.</p><p>Chick-fil-A had long supported "family values" organizations that not only work against gay rights in this country, but also try to make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment or even death in countries like Uganda. The company's policies finally came to public attention when their president, the Founder's son Dan Cathy, went on a talk-radio program and said that supporters of marriage equality for gays have a "prideful, arrogant attitude" and are "inviting God's judgment on our nation". That led to a boycott against Chick-fil-A, which Wayne Self, a gay man, wanted to promote. </p><p>Now normally, the way you promote something like that is you stand on the barricades and yell about what evil bastards the people on the other side are: We're the good people; they're the bad people.</p><p>But Self did an unusual thing: He didn't just try to rally the troops who already agreed with him. He decided he wanted to convince people who either hadn't been involved in this issue, or maybe even had been leaning the other way.</p><p>So he didn't write rants. He wrote fables, he told stories, he had heart-to-heart dialogs with the commenters on his blog. Most important of all, he did not put himself on a pedestal and demonize his opponents.</p><p>Instead, in <a href="http://www.owldolatrous.com/?p=369">this post</a>, he talked about an attitude we all have to struggle against,which he called <em>supremacy</em> and defined as "the habit of believing or acting as if your life, your love, your culture, your self has more intrinsic worth than those of people who differ from you." And he focused not just on denouncing heterosexual supremacists, who think their relationships have more intrinsic worth than gay relationships, but also on his own struggle to overcome supremacist attitudes:</p><blockquote><p>I grew up in the rural South. I never hated African-Americans. I never knowingly said or did or voted in any way that hurt African-American people. I even had African-American friends. But I’d be lying to you if I didn’t admit that some white supremacy seeped into my thinking at a very young age. This is a painful thing to admit. Even now, I find I can’t go into specifics, from sheer shame. ...</p><p>Some people turn supremacy into an over-arching philosophy. For most, it’s just a habit of mind. As a habit of mind, supremacist ideas can spring up in anyone. Being liberal doesn’t make you immune. Being gay doesn’t make you immune. Being a minority doesn’t make you immune.</p><p>You don’t have to hate people to feel innately superior to them. After all, what kind of threat are your inferiors to you? You may be annoyed by them, from time to time, or you may even like them. You can even have so much affection for them that you might call that affection love.</p><p>The dangerous thing about a supremacist point of view is that it can accompany even warm affection. [But] supremacy turns to hate when the feeling of innate superiority is openly challenged. </p><p>Like many habits, supremacy can be unconscious. Sometimes you don’t know you’re doing it until someone points it out. ...</p><p>I’m 43 years old now, and I’ve had time to change my supremacist habits of mind. I did it by knowing more African-American people, by listening instead of talking, by humbling myself and not demanding that I must agree with everyone in order to support them,and, most importantly, by admitting that <strong>other people’s real lives were more important than my mere beliefs</strong>. </p></blockquote><p><strong>Sermon: The Web of Privilege</strong></p><p>I went to college in the Seventies, when feminism was raising women's consciousness about all the ways that traditional gender roles work against them. So naturally, I heard a lot from female classmates about my male privilege. And I couldn't very well argue, because they were right, I did get unfair advantages from being a man. But all the same, those lectures used to annoy me, so let me try to explain why. </p><p>I grew up in a working class family. The factory my father worked in was loud and dangerous and full of nasty odors that stuck to him when he came home. </p><p>He had that job because he didn't go to college. But he had graduated from high school, and he was proud of that, because his father had only graduated from eighth grade. And grandpa was proud too, I imagine, because it probably wasn't that many generations back that the Muders were all illiterate.</p><p>My sister and I were the first generation in our family to go to college, and eventually I would be the first to get a Ph.D. I will never forget meeting my parents after the graduation ceremony and seeing my father go misty-eyed. "Dr. Muder," he said, as if only a miracle could have brought those two words together.</p><p>So while I was getting that education, even though I recognized the injustice of discrimination against women, it still grated on me that daughters of professors and daughters of millionaires could only see <em>my </em>unfair advantages.</p><p> </p><p>Now, I'm not trying to start an argument about whether classism or sexism is harder to overcome, or how either compares to racism or religious prejudice or some other variety of unfairness. Quite the opposite, I think we've already had too many of those arguments. Throughout American history, it's been way too hard to get people united against unfairness in general, and way too easy for the Powers That Be to play one disadvantaged group off against another. </p><p>Before the Civil War, for example, the abolitionist movement split over whether or not women could hold leadership positions. And after the war, the women's suffrage movement split over the 15th amendment, which gave the vote to black men. (Two famous Unitarian suffragettes parted ways on that. Lucy Stone supported the amendment and Susan B. Anthony didn't.)</p><p>As best I can tell, there has never been a widespread movement to treat everyone more fairly, and to battle unfairness wherever it appears. Instead, we typically look at privilege one dimension at a time -- as racism or sexism or some other Ism. That simplifies things by letting us draw sharp lines between the privileged and the disadvantaged: white and black, native and immigrant, straight and gay, men and women.</p><p>But today I'd like to suggest that the Isms <em>over</em>simplify our notion of privilege. Once you have drawn a line, it's easy imagine a wall there. On one side are the victims, and on the other the oppressors. </p><p>Packaged with that metaphorical wall is a complete set of emotions for each side. On the victim side you're supposed to feel resentment, anger, and envy. On the oppressor side, guilt, but also fear of all those angry people, and anxiety about the possibility of losing a privilege that you have had all your life and may not know how to live without.</p><p>Fear and anxiety can tempt a person to adopt the attitude that Wayne Self called <em>supremacy</em>. You can start to rationalize that the wall is good and natural, and I deserve to be on this side of it, because I am more important or more deserving than the people on the other side. Nothing personal, but there's a very rational reason why I have to be here and they have to be there.</p><p>Today I want to use a different metaphor for privilege and unfairness, one that I think better captures its multi-dimensional nature. </p><p>Privilege isn't a wall, it's a web. </p><p>We all have a complicated relationship to privilege. Everyone, in some aspect of life, is treated unfairly. And everyone also, in some other way, benefits from unfairness. There are many ways to cut that web in two. But depending on who makes that cut and what kind of unfairness they single out, any of us might find ourselves on either the disadvantaged side or the privileged side.</p><p> </p><p>Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not claiming that it all evens out. I stand here today as a straight, white, American male. I am able-bodied, happily married, well educated, and over six feet tall. It would be ridiculous for me to claim that it all evens out, just because I face an occasional disadvantage here or there. No, all I'm claiming is that privilege is a subtle issue. </p><p>And while I believe nearly everyone -- even people like me -- could be happier in a fairer world, that progress will not come for free. We're not going to get to a fairer world just by claiming our rights in the situations where we are treated unfairly. We'll also have to raise our consciousness about the ways that we benefit from unfairness.</p><p> </p><p>One problem with thinking of privilege as a wall comes from the villainous stereotypes we have of the people on the oppressor side: Simon Legree driving his slaves; Scrooge, asking why the poor can't be sent to prisons or workhouses; or even hotel magnate Leona Helmsley saying, "Taxes are for the little people."</p><p>If that's how we picture the privileged, then how are we going to react when someone draws the line in such a way that we wind up on the privileged side? </p><p>Not well, probably. You know you don't get up in the morning planning to be a villain, so if someone seems to be saying that you are one, your instinctive reaction is going to be: "No. That can't be right." </p><p>Stung by the charge, it's tempting to turn the whole thing around, to point back at the people who are pointing the finger at you and say, "<em>They're </em>the ones who are being unfair. They're persecuting me with these vicious accusations."</p><p>And so, Rush Limbaugh feels terribly persecuted by the people who say he's a racist, and by all the "feminazis" who say he's sexist. They're the villains, not him.</p><p>An even better example is Dan Cathy of Chick-fil-A. I don't doubt that he sees a good, Christian man in his mirror. He creates jobs. He generously supports what he calls "family values", but what gays like Wayne Self see as heterosexual supremacy.</p><p>So when gay-rights supporters boycott Cathy's restaurants, that just proves to Cathy's allies how oppressed <em>Christians </em>are in this country. Mike Huckabee sees the boycotters unfairly trying to punish Cathy for doing nothing more than speaking his truth and living the values of his faith. A wall of privilege separates Christians from secular society, and to Huckabee it's <em>secularists like Wayne Self </em>who are on the privileged side. Dan Cathy -- that straight, white, male, Christian, millionaire CEO -- is oppressed.</p><p> </p><p>Today I'd like to suggest a different stereotype of privilege, something a little less villainous than Scrooge or Simon Legree. It comes from the movie <em>Pleasantville</em>, which some of you may have seen. </p><p>In this movie, a teen-age brother and sister get hold of a magic remote control and are zapped into a 1950s TV show, one of those family comedies like <em>Ozzie and Harriet </em>or <em>Leave it to Beaver</em>. Suddenly, they are the son and daughter of the Parkers, a perfect TV family living in the perfect TV town of Pleasantville.</p><p>Naturally, things start to change all around. The teens learn a few things from their new experiences, and the people of Pleasantville start asking the kinds of questions that characters on such shows never asked, like "Do I like my life?" and "Why do things have to be this way?" In particular, Mrs. Parker discovers that being the perfect housewife is not really what she wants out of life, or at least it's not all she wants. </p><p>And that sets up this scene:</p><p>George Parker, the father of the perfect TV family, comes home from work. He opens the door, hangs his hat on a hook like he always does, and announces, "Honey, I'm home", expecting his beautiful, smiling wife to come out of the kitchen and his perfect children to bounce down the stairs to greet him, like they always do.</p><p>Today, though, the house is dark and silent but for the thunder of a storm outside. And George looks like a magician who has said the magic words, but is still waiting for the puff of smoke and the rabbit to appear in his hat. </p><p>So he says the magic words again, "Honey, I'm home." Nothing happens.</p><p>He wanders through the house, and into the kitchen where nothing is on the table. "Where's my dinner?" he wonders. He looks in the oven, inside the kettles. "Where's my dinner?" Uncomprehending, he goes back outside, into the rain, and pleads with this suddenly unsympathetic universe: "Where's my dinner?"</p><p> </p><p>Remember: George Parker is somebody's idea of the perfect Dad. He never <em>intended </em>to be a bad guy. All his life he has tried to be a very good guy, and he thought he was doing a decent job of it. Society gave him a role to play, and he played it to the best of his ability. That's how he thought life was supposed to be: I play my role, you play your role, and it all works out.</p><p>Now, if you could sit George down and make him think about it, maybe he'd realize that his role as a professional-class husband and father is a little easier and more pleasant than some of the other roles in Pleasantville. </p><p>But he doesn't think about it, because he doesn't have to. He's never had to plot with the other professional-class husbands to oppress his wife or the characters who do Pleasantville's menial jobs. That's just how the social roles work out. And he assumes that because he's happy in his role, other people must be happy in theirs.</p><p>George's example points out several aspects of privilege that may make our own privileges easier to see. First, the privileged are usually not evil, they're just oblivious.</p><p><em>Saturday Night Live </em>brought that home in a skit a few months ago: Geeks on a technology show are picking apart the flaws of the new iPhone 5, when the host unexpectedly brings out three workers from the iPhone factory in Shenzhen. </p><p>Suddenly, all the complaints dry up.</p><p>"We understand," sympathizes one of the Chinese, who makes a tiny wage for doing debilitating work in unhealthy conditions. "Apple Maps, it no work. You want Starbucks, it take you Dunkin Donuts. Must be so hard for you."</p><p> </p><p>You probably don't think about it very often -- I know I don't -- but every time you walk into a store, you are playing a privileged role as an American consumer. All over the world, underpaid people are breaking their backs or even risking their lives so that you can pay $10 for a pair of jeans or have fruit in the middle of winter.</p><p>It's so easy to forget that. </p><p>The whole retail environment conspires with our obliviousness.There's no workshop in the back where you can see production happening. You just see a product and a price. The product doesn't come from anywhere. No one makes it. It just appears on the shelf by magic. </p><p> </p><p>And that points up a second way in which our privilege resembles George Parker's: It's more systemic than personal. </p><p>If you've ever bought clothes at WalMart or Sears, they may have been made at the factory that burned down last month in Bangladesh. Over 100 workers died in that fire because there were no outside-the-building fire escapes. Those deaths were easily preventable if the factory hadn't been under so much pressure to keep costs down.</p><p>Now, you didn't want anything bad to happen to those workers. You didn't demand that WalMart squeeze that last fifty cents out of the cost of your shirt. Like George, you just played your role in the system.</p><p>George never wanted his wife to be unhappy. He just wanted dinner. And there's nothing actually wrong with wanting dinner, just like there's nothing wrong with wanting an iPhone or a Chick-fil-A sandwich or a good deal on a pair of jeans. What's wrong is that attitude of supremacy, that feeling that our needs, our desires, our inconveniences are so much more important anybody else's.</p><p>And because privilege is so systemic, even if you manage to overcome your obliviousness and root out that attitude of supremacy, it's not always clear what to do. </p><p>Last January, a series of articles called attention to the abusive conditions in those Chinese factories that make Apple's gadgets. I paid attention because I have an iPad and a MacBook that might have come from there. In a year or two I might want a newer model.</p><p>But what should I do? Throwing my iPad away accomplishes nothing. Buying a competing product accomplishes nothing, because they're all made in similar factories that treat workers no better. And if people like me forgo electronic gadgets entirely, the workers won't be treated any better, they'll just lose their jobs.</p><p>If you want electronic gadgets, and are willing to pay someone a livable wage to make them for you … the market doesn't offer you that option. In the comments on the online versions of those articles, many people wondered: Why can't Apple -- or somebody -- make an "ethical iPad" and charge a little more to recover the higher costs?</p><p>But of course that would break the spell of the Apple Store. If the ethical iPad were displayed next to the "unethical" iPad,everybody who chose between them would have to think about where these products come from. </p><p>The magic of retail would be lost.</p><p>So the market doesn't offer that option. With only a few exceptions -- like Fair Trade coffee or vegetables at the farmers' market -- it rarely does. The workers are treated the way they're treated, and you either want the product or you don't. No personal choice you can make will solve the problem. And if you feel guilty about it, that doesn't change anything either.</p><p> </p><p>So far what I'm describing is more tragic than malicious. So of course it can't be the whole story, because the history of privilege and oppression is full of malice. It's full of wars and riots and lynchings and beating up people who try to organize the underprivileged. Where does all that come from? It starts with how you react when your obliviousness gets challenged, when the under-privileged begin to raise their consciousness and tell you that this is unfair, or when they stop cooperating and disrupt the system of privilege. </p><p>When that happens, I imagine that everybody's initial reaction is the same: We notice our own inconvenience first. George may eventually learn to empathize with his wife, but the very first thing he notices is that he has no dinner. Dan Cathy notices that his restaurants are getting bad publicity. I notice that people are making me feel guilty about owning an iPad.</p><p>And because we never planned on being villains, there's a strong temptation to deny everything to tell each other stories that make us feel better. After the fire in Bangladesh, Fox News told us how happy those workers were to have those jobs. People have been telling stories like that for generations: The slaves were said to be happy on the Southern plantations, and 19th-century women were content to let their husbands worry about difficult issues like voting or owning property.</p><p>Sometimes the stories even say that the victims deserve what they get, like those evil gays and lesbians who break God's law, or those pushy women and uppity blacks who insist on going where nobody wants them. As Wayne Self wrote: "Supremacy turns to hate when the feeling of innate superiority is openly challenged."</p><p>Even when you have to admit that you've been benefitting from privilege, it's tempting to hold up your own inconvenience, your doing-without-dinner, as if it were equal to other people's lifelong oppression. </p><p>In another post, Wayne Self shoots down the idea that Dan Cathy's public-relations problems are in any way equivalent to the problems faced by gays: "This isn’t about mutual tolerance," he writes, "because there’s nothing mutual about it. If we agree to disagree on this issue, you walk away a full member of this society and I don’t."</p><p>Yes, the privileged suffer too, but on an entirely different scale. "Men," Margaret Atwood observed, "are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them."</p><p> </p><p>So, to sum up, you were born into an unfair society, just like everybody else. But it's not unfair in just one way. The ways that unfairness works against you are usually pretty obvious. But it's easy to remain oblivious to all the ways it works for you. </p><p>You're not responsible for where in the web of privilege you were born, but you are responsible for whether or not you remain oblivious to it. And you're responsible for how you respond after you become aware. Do you make amends where you can? Do you work for systemic change when personal change isn't enough? Or do you make excuses for your privileges and blame the victims for the inconveniences you suffer when they try to improve their lot? When you are treated unfairly, do you regard those who are privileged over you as villains who don't resemble you at all?</p><p>It would be pleasant to think that once you see the light, there's a simple way to go and sin no more. But very often there isn't, because your privilege is baked into the system and you can't just give it back. </p><p>That's why it's so important that when you <em>have </em>an opportunity to make the world fairer, you do something with it. And when suffering people come to you with a plan to change the system, listen hard and give them a little benefit of the doubt, even if their issue seems distant or their plan seems unlikely to work. Because the system does need to change. A lot of the unfairness in the world isn't going to be fixed just by individuals deciding to do the right thing.</p><p>And finally, it's important not to forget either side of the experience of privilege. When we benefit from unfairness, it's important to recall how it feels to be taken advantage of. And when we suffer from unfairness, we need to remember how shocking it can be to suddenly recognize a privilege that you never thought about and never asked for. </p><p>Holding both those experiences in mind can help us stay in dialog with those whose privileges are different, and make us more effective in working with them for ever more fairness.</p><p><strong>Closing Words </strong></p><p>The closing words are by President Lyndon Johnson. </p><p>In March of 1965, after violence in Selma had killed a number of civil rights demonstrators, including the Unitarian minister James Reeb, Johnson convened a joint session of Congress and asked them to pass the Voting Rights Act. </p><p>Johnson was never known as a great speaker, and many Northerners had trouble believing that anything worthwhile could be said in that rural Texas accent he had. But that day he gave a remarkable speech, and it built up to this conclusion:</p><p>"It is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we <em>shall </em>overcome." </p>http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-web-of-privilege.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-6129927727168902377Thu, 11 Oct 2012 12:53:00 +00002012-10-11T08:53:33.959-04:00Whence Cometh My Hope?<br />In September, I went back to my hometown (Quincy, IL) to speak at the UU church there, as I have several times before. I didn't know about that church when I was growing up Lutheran in Quincy, but in recent years I've arranged to speak there at times when I knew I was going to be in town anyway to visit my parents. Since it's the church where I speak most often (sometimes twice in a year, which I know sounds like nothing to ministers), it tends to be the place where I try out new stuff.<br /><br />I used to publish the texts on this blog, but the Quincy UUs do such a good job putting up texts (and even audio!) promptly that I've started just linking to the <a href="http://uuquincy.org/index.shtml">uuquincy.org</a> site.<br /><br />The talk I gave there September 30 (<a href="http://uuquincy.org/talks/20120930.shtml">text</a>, <a href="http://theshopclerk.com/uuq-pod/124-WhenceComethMyHope.mp3">audio</a>) was called "Whence Cometh My Hope?", which is a play on "Whence Cometh My Help?" from Psalm 121. It's sort of a sequel to "<a href="http://uuquincy.org/talks/20110403.shtml">The Story of Our Deaths</a>", which I gave there in April, 2011. (It later got expanded into "<a href="http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2012_05_01_archive.html">A Humanist Approach to Death</a>" for the Concord Area Humanists.)<br /><br />"The Story of Our Deaths" is about the problems that can arise when you conceive your life story as ending (or just <i>possibly</i> ending) in death rather than going on to a glorious, eternal afterlife. Stories are an important way that we motivate ourselves to do things that are not pleasant in the moment (like get out of a warm bed when the alarm clock goes off on a cold and dark winter morning). Through stories, our experiences acquire a aura of meaning that is larger than the immediate sensations. (I'm not just driving through monotonous traffic; I'm on my way to something really important or cool. So I'm not bored, I'm excited.)<br /><br />Just as the moment gets an aura of meaning from its place in the story of your day, the day gets meaning from its place in larger and larger stories, all the way up to the story of your life. But if the story of your life just ends in death, what kind of motivation can it provide? If you obsess unskillfully on that ending, all your stories can collapse like a row of dominoes, until even the current moment (which may not be threatening death at all, and may even be pleasant) can start to seem meaningless. What's it all for, if I'm just going to die anyway?<br /><br />So "The Story of Our Deaths" is about that problem of meaninglessness, and how to imagine the story of your life in a more skillful way, so that the prospect of death does not unravel all the meaning in life. It comes to two conclusions: First, the fortune-cookie-obvious notion that you have to appreciate moments as they come; if your life is actually finite, you can't keep pushing the meaningful part off into the ever-shrinking future. And second, you have to find a role for yourself in a story that won't end when you die. If you're totally self-centered, then the end of your life might as well be the end of the Universe. But if you have a role in a larger story, your actions can continue to be meaningful right up to the moment you die.<br /><br />The example I give is from Martin Luther King's "Mountaintop Speech", delivered the night before he died. In that speech he anticipated that he could die soon, but said "I don't mind, because I've been to the mountaintop". King saw himself playing a role in the story of his people's march to freedom, which would go on even if he died.<br /><br />The obvious objection is: "Well, that's fine if you're Martin Luther King." Most of us can't write ourselves into history that way; the world will little note nor long remember us after we're gone. In "The Story of Our Deaths" I mention this objection and suggest that we can find meaningful roles in the stories of our loved ones, our communities, our professions, and other stories smaller than the kind of history that will appear in textbooks. But I didn't say much more about it.<br /><br />That's where "Whence Cometh My Hope?" picks up. This talk is more personal; it centers on my own effort to write myself into a larger story. It's about my political blog, "<a href="http://weeklysift.com/">The Weekly Sift</a>", and the story I hope to play some small role in: the battle between journalism and propaganda, which I think is key to whether or not democracy will continue to be feasible.<br /><br />A number of problems come up, which I'll let you read in the text. But I save the most interesting one to the end: the problem of failure. This turns out to be remarkably similar to the problem of death, in that it threatens to unravel all meaning. How meaningful would Martin Luther King's story be if Jim Crow had come back in his lifetime? What happens to my story if propaganda wins and democracy is effectively over in my lifetime?<br /><br />Traditional religion offers multiple levels of faith-based responses to this problem: (1) You won't fail because God will help you. (2) Even if you should lose this battle, you can identify with the ultimate victory of Good (as in King's "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice").<br /><br />I find (1) to be like the afterlife solution to the problem of death: It works fine as long as you can believe it, but I just lack that faith. I <i>almost</i> have the faith required by (2), but it tends to desert me at the worst possible times. (What if the long-term bend towards justice is just a wrinkle in the even <i>longer</i> bend towards injustice?)<br /><br />Both of those are optimism-based solutions: They explain why the future is going to turn out well. I end up going for a hope-based solution, in which I don't pretend to know whether the future will turn out well or not, but I believe that trying is better than not trying.<br /><br />Hope, I recognize, also requires a kind of faith. But it turns out to be a faith I have, so I don't have to constantly gin it up or talk myself into it. And that, I suppose, is the ultimate message of the two talks together: Every solution to the problem of meaninglessness requires some kind of faith. But I would rather look into my soul, find the faith I have, and build on that, rather than accept some external authority's description of the faith I'm supposed to have, and try to talk myself into it.<br />http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2012/10/whence-cometh-my-hope.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13399254.post-4841987684896891053Tue, 31 Jul 2012 03:06:00 +00002012-07-30T23:06:14.289-04:00My latest UU World column went up today. It contains my reflections on the Justice GA we just had in Phoenix. You can find it <a href="http://uuworld.org/spirit/articles/211967.shtml">here</a>.http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2012/07/my-latest-uu-world-column-went-up-today.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Doug Muder)0